--- Mia ---
"You are a tourist, and you are powerful enough to kill a demon lord?" Felix asked.
"Yes, I have a lot of subscribers, you see. I'm magic. Oh, and Mia and Kate are magic now, too."
Tom sounded really boisterous. Maybe he was trying to intimidate Felix by pointing out that all three of them were powerful now? Good thinking!
"What do you mean, they are magic? How?" Felix asked.
"I saved Mia, and Lilian Weaver, who is way more famous than I am, thought that she was fun, so now she has subscribers, too."
Tom chortled and barely kept himself from laughing as he continued: "Mia is a Nekomancer now! Can you believe it?"
"A Nekomancer?" He responded, looking at her, with awe written on his face but incredulity in his voice. "I do find that difficult to believe, but stranger things have happened where humans are involved."
"And then Mia used her Nekomancy to empower Kate, so now she gets stronger from doing pushups!" Tom continued.
"Everyone gets stronger from doing pushups." Felix countered laconically.
"Well, yeah, but Kate now gets super extra stronger from just a few pushups, because she is a gamer. And Mia can even summon more support with her Nekomancy if she wants. Like Schroedinger the cat!" Tom continued.
"I see." Felix responded slowly. "And is Schroedinger in the room with us right now?"
"No, he isn't. She has to summon him first." Tom responded.
Ok, so maybe Tom wasn't trying to intimidate Felix, after all. Maybe his plan was to make him think Tom was insane, to get him to lower his guard? If that was the plan, then it looked like it was working. Of course the more likely explanation was that Tom had no plan at all and was just winging it.
"Alright, I am now fully convinced that you are human." Felix said after a brief pause. "An impostor would have come up with a more believable story."
"An impostor also wouldn't be able to do this!" Tom exclaimed. Then he punched the wall and turned it into yet another sword.
"Dude, we live here! Nyaa!" Kate shouted, staring at the destroyed wall.
"Oops. Sorry?" Tom replied sheepishly.
Felix barely reacted to that sudden outburst of constructive violence. He just replied calmly: "Actually, an impostor probably would be able to do that, if they were prepared enough. Vetunia Quaestrive's time is very important and getting her to waste her attention on a scam would be worth a significant investment of power for rival megacorps. But I believe that those rivals would have come up with a more believable backstory than tourism. Time is of the essence, and I am convinced enough that I am going to call her now."
He pressed a few buttons on his wrist-mounted computer, then placed a small hologram projector on a nearby table. Seconds later, an image of a Malumian woman appeared in the air as Vetunia Quaestrive accepted the call.
Mia's heart started beating faster. Dealing with a representative of somebody this powerful was bad enough, but talking to her directly? That was insane! This was a woman whose family controlled a megacorp! The only reason Mia wouldn't call her one of the most powerful people on the planet was because she usually didn't deign to visit this planet at all.
Vetunia's hologram looked at Felix and smiled. "Mister Serenus, I was hoping you would call. So your suspicions were correct?"
"Indeed, ma'am. Mr. Tom Purrson is a human, nyaa."
"In that case, you have my undivided attention." She responded, as she turned off various devices on her desk and focused on them.
Despite her small stature, the young woman had an incredible presence and Mia felt like Vetunia's gaze was trying to drill into her very soul. Metaphorically speaking. She was reasonably certain that even powerful psions couldn't actually do that.
She was very nervous, but her survival instincts kicked in and she focused on what mattered. The Malumians were dangerous, but some of them were more dangerous than others and it was important to be able to tell the difference.
Purrian women normally paid very little attention to other women's looks, of course. They judged them mostly by their personalities. It was a natural evolutionary adaptation to make harem formation easier. But in this case it was very important for Mia to pay close attention to Vetunia's looks in order to learn who she was dealing with.
The most distinctive and important features to watch out for in a Malumian were traces of demonic heritage: Their dealings with demons sometimes caused Malumians to mutate, which could lead to all sorts of deformations. Vetunia had few of those, as far as Mia could see: She had horns on her head, and a spade tail.
More importantly, her mutations looked older, not fresh. If she ever practiced ritual sacrifices, then at least not recently. It was even entirely possible that her mutations were inborn, and the woman did not sacrifice any people for personal power at all. For a member of the ultra rich elite, this was beyond unusual. Mia kind of wanted to ask her about it, but could not think of a polite way to phrase the question. Saying "So it looks like you don't murder all that many people for personal power? What gives?" Might be seen as rude.
Vetunia looked young, and roughly as unattractive as Kate and herself. That was somewhat ironic, because Mia recognized the type of demonic influence on her: Her mutations were related to succubi, demons that represented sex and lust.
However, this was a topic where biological and cultural differences between Malumians and other species made a huge difference: The Malumian sex drive depended very little on physical beauty and very strongly on mutual respect. It was biologically impossible for them to feel attraction to anyone unless they respected the other person and could sense that this respect was reciprocated. To them, an ideal relationship was always a mutually beneficial partnership first and foremost: Both partners should drive each other on, and help each other to achieve greater things than what they could achieve on their own.
Mia had once read a novel intended for a Malumian audience. It was about a brilliant but socially incompetent scientist working together with a social manipulator to conquer a country. She was quite surprised to learn that this was apparently considered a steamy romance novel. To her, it read more like a power fantasy. The author never even mentioned the hair or eye color of either protagonist, and they never dicked around cockily in the least.
Although to be fair, years later she overheard that the novel she read was a sanitized version with all the sex scenes removed. Apparently when two people were really deeply connected and reliant on each other, they were also more open to things that would raise some eyebrows if you brought them up with a more casual acquaintance, and the publisher thought it best to just remove all those scenes entirely in order to increase mass market appeal. She found it a bit weird that removing sex scenes could somehow increase mass market appeal instead of reducing it, so she wisely decided not to inquire further.
Mia honestly found it kind of depressing that the oppressive demonic slavers generally had much more wholesome romances than other species. It just went to show that you shouldn't paint people with a broad brush, even if they were awful in pretty much every other way.
This species-wide oddity also explained a bit about differences in their social structure: A lovestruck Purrian would buy chocolate or flowers for the object of their affection. A Malumian would instead try to demonstrate competence and gain respect by crushing their enemies. It was not hard to see that one of those led to more economic dominance than the other.
This unusual way to experience attraction combined oddly with succubus heritage: First off, it explained why she didn't look like anything special. For any other species, being descended from a sex demon would probably make you gorgeous, since most species cared so much about beauty. But for Malumians that wasn't the case, so she just had very plain and ordinary looks, bordering on the unattractive side: Young, dainty, and very top-heavy.
However, since Malumians experienced attraction based on mutual respect, the increased sex drive she inherited from her succubus heritage would directly lead to an increased drive to become the sort of person that others would respect. For a Malumian, that mostly meant becoming incredibly rich and powerful, or training to better yourself and pick up skills, so that you could become even more rich and powerful later. Even their dating habits ended up being productive: Since they found competence attractive, dating effectively doubled as professional networking for them.
In short, a succubus heritage usually caused Malumians to become hyper-competitive workaholics.
Unfortunately, that told her nothing new. She had already expected Vetunia to be hyper-competitive, because anyone in her position would be. It just made the contrast all the starker that her demonic traits looked older. Wouldn't someone this competitive want to grab every possible scrap of power? Mia would have expected her to sacrifice people for power as a matter of daily routine. She definitely wouldn't complain that this assumption was apparently wrong, but it still worried her because it was unexpected.
She continued her observation by focusing on the woman's dress. Vetunia wore exactly what Mia would expect a Malumian with succubus heritage to wear: A very formal, very professional looking toga. It covered her entire body, showing very little skin, and made her look very mature and respectable.
She looked more closely, and only her great eyesight allowed her to spot something unexpected: Vetunia also seemed to be wearing an undersuit of black leather as well as some ropes under her toga. Neither of those were things she had seen Malumians wear before, and those ropes looked distinctly uncomfortable.
Well, Vetunia was very rich, so presumably those clothes were some highly specific parts of Malumian high culture that Mia had simply never heard of. There wasn't much point in thinking about it, and so she focused her attention on something else.
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Where Vetunia was looking at them sternly, Felix was all smiles.
It was an interesting contrast: Felix was physically imposing and his tiger-like looks gave off very dangerous vibes. He would have no difficulty intimidating people, so he presented an image of calm to counteract that. In contrast, Vetunia looked small and harmless, but she was staring at them like a judgmental and unimpressed goddess. As the heiress of a megacorp, she probably had to deal with people three times her age in board meetings, where she would need to be able to exude an aura of dominance in order to be taken seriously at all.
Well, at least all of that was what Mia thought was going on with the two of them. She was a good judge of character, but she had been wrong before.
That was when it occurred to her: She was magic now. She was a Nekomancer, a class known for its social abilities.
She wondered if there were any skills she could use to learn more about Vetunia and Felix. At her mental prompting, FEI replied:
New skill unlocked! Name Observe Description Gain information about a target object or person. This skill's mana cost depends on the target and is influenced by many factors. The cost is not necessarily indicative of difficulty or usefulness. Tags Knowledge acquisition, anthropic probability manipulation Warning Obtaining information through this skill can reduce Faith Engine efficiency by creating additional constraints. This ability comes with a safe mode, which is enabled by default and strongly recommended. In safe mode, information will be filtered and obfuscated strategically to balance constraints against the usefulness of the information. This can result in cryptic messages. Safe mode Active
That skill sounded awesome! The warning was a little worrying, but apparently safe mode was active by default, so there was no harm in it.
She was still looking at Vetunia, and a popup appeared over her as soon as she thought about her [Observe] skill.
Vetunia Quaestrive, Heiress of the Quaestrive Consortium Observe: 2743 mana
Wow. That was just absurdly expensive. She briefly wondered what her current mana was, and immediately learned that it was 547. A lot more than she had an hour ago, but far from enough for even a single use of her skill. What was even the point of a skill she couldn't use?
As her eyes drifted away from Vetunia, the popup changed.
Vetunia's toga Observe: 372 mana
That was much cheaper, but still absurd. What was up with these mana costs?
How about something even more specific?
Ropes under Vetunia's toga Observe: 26 mana
Mia decided to give the skill a try. Maybe she could learn something about their cultural significance that could give her insights into Vetunia's personality.
Note Output filtered by Safe Mode. Observation Yo, she be down bad.
..."down bad"?
She had never heard that phrase before. What an odd figure of speech. The system had warned her about cryptic messages, so maybe it was a metaphor? "Down" and "bad" were both negative. Did this make it a double negative, implying that Vetunia was good, in some sense? If so, did the system mean "morally good", or "good at her job"? There was a rather significant difference between those two for a CEO.
Or maybe she was overthinking things again?
She decided to get some more data by using her [Observe] skill on other things.
She looked at Kate.
Kate Observe: 1874 mana Note: This is your girlfriend. You have already observed her very thoroughly.
That was true. If there was anything more she could learn about Kate, she would rather hear it from her own mouth, and not from a weird privacy-violating magic system. The humans allegedly had a government that ran on truth-telling, and Tom was a celebrity who seemed to think nothing about being under constant surveillance. They presumably had very different cultural norms about privacy. Not that Mia was one to talk if she was honest with herself. She was a huge gossip and frankly having people watch her all the time sounded more flattering than disturbing to her.
In any case, Observing Kate was almost as expensive as Observing Vetunia.
"...that is correct. He does not represent anyone and is doing all this for fun." Felix said to Vetunia.
Oh damn, she had missed part of that conversation. Talking was apparently a free action because Tom had a skill for that, but thinking and experimenting with skills still took time. The world did not come to a halt just because it would be more narratively convenient for her if it did. She wondered if there was a skill for that.
"I see. So you are a tourist, you have no backers, and yet you managed to circumvent our banking system and defeated a demon lord in combat?" Vetunia asked. She sounded uncertain, and kept glancing at Felix as she continued. "You must have some plan though? A travel itinerary, perhaps? Would you care to share those plans with us? Maybe we can help with the sight-seeing."
Oh gods. It felt like she was in a movie, but they were working off different scripts. She was pretty sure that Vetunia assumed Tom was some kind of secret agent and trying to communicate in code. Felix would know all about that, being a professional shadewalker. But he looked a little out of his depth, too. She fully expected that the two of them had some secret code to communicate with each other, but they probably never came up with a code for "no, this guy is actually just an idiot and there is no hidden meaning here".
"Well, at first I just wanted to have fun and meet interesting people." Tom responded. "But then I found out that you are keeping slaves. So now I will do everything within my power to free them!"
He drew one of his flaming swords and began waving it around dramatically in the air. Felix took a step back, but he realized quickly that Tom was just being theatrical and wasn't going to attack him.
Meanwhile, Vetunia picked up a calculator and punched in some numbers. The device was made of solid gold and covered in legitimantic runes. It was probably worth more than the building they were in.
Tom continued waving his flaming sword around and kept raising his voice louder and louder: "I will end your tyranny! I will bring liberty to all who suffer under your yoke!"
He sounded really into it! This was so awesome! Tom was willing to stand up for her and Kate, and all their friends who he didn't even know. So cool! She shared a look with Kate, who looked just as excited and entranced.
"I will restore the rights of the people you have wronged and..."
"Ok. That sounds like something we can make work." Vetunia interrupted him calmly as she put the calculator back down.
Tom visibly tripped over his words as he got derailed in the middle of his speech.
"Huh? Come again?" He asked.
"I said, we can make this work. If freeing some slaves is all you want, I am sure we can come to an agreement."
Tom stared at her open mouthed for several seconds, with a look of pure puzzlement on his face.
"...I was kind of expecting to fight people until all the slaves are free, to be honest. You want to negotiate?"
"Of course I do. Why would I spend my time and have Felix go to all this effort to contact you, if not to negotiate?" Vetunia asked.
Felix looked at Tom with narrowed eyes. "Were you seriously planning to fight an entire Megacorp worth of mercenaries? On your own? And you expected to win?"
"Well, there wasn't a lot of planning going on, to be honest. It was more like: 'There are slaves here, so I should go free the slaves'. That's what you do when you find out that there are slaves, you know?"
"Are you saying that you only found out about slavery this evening? How? Slavery is a major part of the Malumian economy."
Tom rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah. Well. I didn't read the cultural primer. People keep bringing that up. Maybe I overdid it a little with the wilful ignorance thing."
Then he turned towards Vetunia's hologram and pointed his hand at her in accusation: "You are an evil slaver! Why would you want to negotiate?"
Vetunia blinked in visible confusion. "Maybe there is an error in translation here? Or a cultural misunderstanding? Slavery means treating people as property that can be traded. Why wouldn't I want to negotiate? Getting rich through trade is my job. You humans are powerful, which means there is something for me to gain here. I have plenty of slaves, but zero human supporters. I want to change that. Getting your support would give me a competitive advantage that is likely worth far more than some slaves."
"But you people murder slaves for power! Do you think I will just overlook that?"
Tom stared at her with pure hatred in his eyes.
Vetunia, for her part, looked unsurprised and met his gaze without flinching.
"I won't beat around the bush. My ancestors sacrificed people for power. I have inherited some of those powers through my bloodline. But I have never sacrificed anyone myself."
"You expect me to believe that?" Tom replied angrily.
"Actually, she might be telling the truth, nyaa!" Mia intervened. "All of her mutations look old. I can usually tell when they are recent."
"Maybe she is lying about that somehow? Can she fake that? It looks like she wants us to believe that she is like the one good person we could trust even though the rest of her people are evil? That's like Evil Manipulator 101. Even I am not stupid enough to believe that! And trust me, I'm very stupid, which means you really suck at deception."
"Ooh, self burn. Those are rare, nyaa." Kate commented.
"Do you really expect me to believe that you are a good person?" Tom asked.
"Of course not. I am a CEO." Vetunia replied.
Was it only her imagination, or did Vetunia's poker face just slip a little when she gave that answer? Why would that be? Mia always enjoyed looking for subtle social cues, and now that FEI had made her a Nekomancer and she put points into her intelligence, she was probably even better at it. But Vetunia had actual training as a negotiator. Mia's boosted intuition was pitted against a professional dissembler. It would be exciting, if the stakes weren't so high.
"I don't sacrifice people for power because that would be stupid." Vetunia continued. "The demons make sure that the ratio of life sacrificed to power gained is greatly skewed in their favor. The personal gain from empowerment is calculated to be less than the long term worth of the sacrifice. The demons literally calculate the exchange ratio that way in order to maximize profit."
"Wait." Mia interrupted. "Are you saying that there is some kind of metaphysical exchange rate of life-to-money?"
"Like soul coins in video games, nyaa?" Kate added.
"As I understand it, games tend to take some liberties with the mechanics, but broadly speaking, yes."
"Wow. That is super fucked up." Kate replied.
"Yes, yes it is. The soul trade is a zero sum game and the demons are better at it than almost any mortal investor. It's just not economically sensible to participate at all, and yet people keep doing it because of cultural inertia and for signalling purposes."
Mia was pretty sure that Vetunia had a different reason for thinking that the soul trade was fucked up than everyone else, but she was going to take what she could get.
Vetunia shook her head, then continued with a surprising amount of scorn and conviction in her voice:
"Besides, ritually sacrificing people for personal power is kind of cringe. It's a sign of insecurity. The whole point of being rich is having other people do things for you while you focus on leading and managing them. Why would I want to reduce my number of slaves just so I get more personal power? That would mean that I have to do physical labor myself!
"It might make a little sense if the sacrificial rituals at least gave us a superpower that is useful for management, but they don't. It's mostly dangerous and needlessly edgy offensive magic. The ability to shoot fire from your eyes isn't going to make you a better manager. If it does, you have a discipline problem and you should probably do team building exercises instead of sacrificing people."