After leaving the office Ryuji headed for the dilapidated building near the river while Varon sprinted off towards the moneychanger. As they parted Ryuji told him that he preferred to work with a lad named Shoan and Varon nodded ascent. A moment later and Ryuji was standing next to the building while all the cats muttered about the best way to fix the building.
Ryuji walked up behind one of the men and asked about the condition of the building. “How does it look, are you going to be able to use it while it’s being repaired? I don’t know anything about the place but it looks pretty bad from the outside.”
The well-muscled, broad-shouldered, grey tiger-striped cat beastfolk turned and saluted him with a strange crossed-arm gesture before looking back at the building in the fading evening light with a bit of a grin on his face. “I’m not a carpenter but I can smell the rot and decay of the building. It’s certainly going to take a bit to get it fully restored but there are parts in the back that are clean and dry like it was never used. We will be able to live comfortably in those parts while the repairs are ongoing and there is far more space in just those few rooms than in the family house. We’ll start moving stuff in right away… if that’s alright with you my lord?” Ryuji just nodded with a grin and walked off towards the river bridge and his inn. He could remember seeing others make the same gesture before but he had never realized that it was a salute.
He walked around the front of the building and looked at the state of the wooden portion of the building, it was really bad. He decided to take a quick peek inside and walked through the barely standing wooden doors. After a near miss where he stepped on a part of the floor that started to give under his foot, he began gingerly testing before placing his full weight on any part of the floor. The showroom floor of the building was hard to make out in the fading light but it looked to be mostly moldy broken shelves in a fairly spacious room. As he got farther in, the floor became more reliable and before long he could hear a low conversation ongoing in the rooms farther back.
As he made his way through several rooms it began to occur to him how big the building was. This building was easily half as big as the general store or maybe even two-thirds as big. There was a commotion going on as he made his way into the room the cats were in. It seemed the cats were having an argument over sleeping arrangements. On one side the tabby cat lady was insisting that one room was more than big enough for just sleeping in and the rest of the building should be used for business as would be proper for such a huge gift. On the other side was the dark gray-furred cat lady insisting that there were enough rooms that using two for sleeping wouldn’t hinder the work arrangements.
As he stepped fully into the room the argument stopped and all eyes, even the children, looked at him. Both women looked a little sheepish at having been caught in a catfight but got over it quickly and joined the others in a similar salute as the others in the room.
After the brief pause for the salute the old cat beastfolk from the market, Gato, walked up and asked Ryuji for his opinion. “My lord, we are ever so appreciative for your help! This building is absolutely splendid, even with the work that needs to be done to it. As I am sure you heard, we were just a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of this blessing and we were unsure of your intentions about our sleeping and working arrangements in the building.”
Once again, the children were the most honest as one spoke in a quiet whine about how much it stinks though. Ryuji smiled at the little girl before speaking. “This is to be your new home as well as your new shop. I didn’t intend to tell you how to do things but I suppose a bit of guidance wouldn’t hurt. You have enough space that you can spread out into more than one room to sleep in. Eventually, you will probably want to get a bit of furniture but that can probably wait for now.”
“Next find the rooms that are the cleanest to live in and work in. Set up a full-time shop making the leather goods in that shop space. That way you won’t have to put up the leatherworking to go to sleep. Once you have the rooms you intend to use picked out then you can begin work on the rest of the place. I don’t expect you to do the work on this building yourselves. I gave you the money to hire people to come here and fix the building for you. If you know people who do the work that’s fine but you will need to talk to the boss of the crew, not the workers themselves. You can talk to Varon, the manager here about introductions and also about building supplies.”
“If you don’t think that you can arrange all of it yourselves then you can go to the tax office and talk to the tax collector. She’s very nice. Her name is Aleen. She arranged the work crew that is fixing the bakery for me right now. She may or may not have more work crews available but you would have to go ask her. Remember, whatever happens, You are respectable business people who work for me. You’re going to have to be courageous because you will need to do a lot of new things from now on but I believe in you.”
After saying his speech, Ryuji left the cats who were deep in thought. He knew it was a lot to ask of them but they needed to grow out of their broken-down mindset. He began wandering through the rest of the building and found it was quite a large space. There were about a dozen rooms of various sizes but most were too moldy and damaged to be usable. There was also a well in one of the rooms and a privy. That got him wondering if the sewers emptied right into the river.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He was still puzzling over that thought as he made his way from the building and began heading back to the Sleeping Tree Inn where he had been sleeping for the last eight days. At the inn, there was a huge commotion as the owner and the patrons had found out he was responsible for catching the killer that had been haunting the city. Everyone seemed ready to buy him an ale but the owner, Teresa, wasn’t about to let anyone pay for his ale, insisting that he would drink free any time he wanted.
There was somebody else who was more eager than the rest to see him. Karen was waiting outside the door to the kitchen waiting to hear word of his return all evening. She and Teresa had received word about Ryuji’s exploits of the previous day around the end of lunch and had been waiting all evening to be filled in on the details.
Karen brought out a tray of bread and a serving tray full of mugs of ale and set it in the middle of the table. Teresa followed close after with two loaded trays of mugs and set them in the middle of the gathering crowd. Once they were both settled Ryuji began explaining what had happened. People were listening so intently that they were hardly even drinking their ale.
When it got to the part about the fingerprint dust, Ryuji said that he made a special potion and didn’t elaborate on the details. He also didn’t bother telling anybody any of the details of the questioning and most of the people around him seemed to get knowing grins on their faces, probably assuming that torture was used and that he didn’t want to tell his girl that he had tortured the info out of the bastard.
When he got to the part about the letter from the duke, he brought out the original letter for everyone to see. As he finished telling how he set the family of cat beastfolk up with a storefront, there were mixed reactions ranging from cheering to grumblings of unfairness to outright disgust about helping beastfolk. Ryuji was reminded of the odd discrimination that people seemed to have towards beastfolk and he told himself that there was only so much he could do. For now, he had helped one family and would have them interacting with people as merchants and that was a step in the right direction.
At the end of his tale, Karen had a strange look on her face. After a moment, Ryuji realized it was a look of worry and he asked her if she was all right. “You got all that property from the duke so I guess you won’t be staying here anymore, will you? I mean, why would you stay here in the first place when you have this much money?”
Once she had voiced her concern, Ryuji could tell that she was on the verge of bursting into tears but was holding it back. He quickly formulated his reply and put on his most charming smile as he replied to her worries. “I guess it might look like that at first but I actually didn’t get an estate or home, just the business. It had six buildings and while one of them is a set of apartments, it’s already full of my employees and their families and I certainly won’t be kicking anyone out of their home just to save a bit on lodging. Besides, even if I do get a home somewhere else, I would still want to come here and take meals.”
Ryuji was going to let that hang for a moment, not mentioning his relationship with Karen until she was about to say something. His plan fell through when Karen was getting tensed to reply and noticed he was baiting her. Her reply came in the form of a light thump on the end of one of his pointy ears and the word jerk breathed lightly into his ear. It was effective. Ryuji hadn’t realized how sensitive the tips of his ears were. Everybody laughed as he gingerly rubbed his offended ear with tears in the corner of his eye.
That night his mug never ran out and there were bards who showed up from out of town. When they heard that he had caught a murderer red-handed they insisted on hearing the tale. After he had told them roughly the same thing, he told the rest he was feeling very tipsy and more than a little light-headed. He told everyone that he needed to go to bed and went to stand up and promptly fell back in his chair.
After everybody had a good laugh, he felt a strong pair of hands helping him up. Looking up he found the owner of those hands was Karen and she helped him to his room. He had an idea and stumbled his way up the stairs with her help and eventually, he made it to his room. When he got there he flopped back onto his bed and just lay there not wanting to move. As he suspected, Karen began pulling his boots off and pushing his legs up onto the bed.
He lay there for a few moments with his eyes closed before cracking his eyelids to peek just in time to see Karen leaning in to kiss him! She didn’t go for a peck on the cheek either, she gingerly stuck the tip of her tongue into his parted lips and when he didn’t resist, she moved into a full French kiss. She kept the kiss going for a couple seconds and Ryuji got a bit bold. He reached his hand up to caress her face in the midst of her messy golden-blonde hair and she flinched and seemed like she was about to pull away but didn’t.
After several more seconds of kissing, she did finally pull away and stood there looking down at him with her beautiful black eyes. He pretended to be asleep because he wasn’t sure if he should try to do anything with this girl. It had only been nine days and besides, she might be drunk and Ryuji definitely didn’t want to take advantage of a drunk girl. Karen smiled down at him for a couple more seconds with an almost sad look on her face before putting out the lantern and closing the door behind her.
As soon as he heard her steps descending the staircase he sat up in bed. He gingerly brought his fingers to his lips and pondered the sensation of Karen’s lips and tongue. This was his first kiss, or perhaps third since it seemed that Karen had a habit of kissing him when he was too drunk to remember it. He had kissed his mom before and he had a younger cousin who kissed him when she was four and he was eight, then she declared that she would marry him when they were grown. None of that was the same as this. This was a real kiss from a girl who knew what it meant. Ryuji sat there thinking about several things for a while longer before he drifted off to sleep still sitting up.