Chapter Twelve

It’s not very hard to keep up with a dwarf, it turns out that while they’re steady joggers, they run like small, overweight children who really aren’t that familiar with the activity. This one had a fairly pronounced limping gait to him, which didn’t make him any faster. But even though I say that, I will also add that the dwarf beside me, who I barely had to do more than speed walk to keep up with thanks to his ‘limp like’ steady jog, didn’t have a jiggly bit of flesh on him.

His belly might have been big, but it must have been packed with muscle. It wasn’t hard to picture an army of dwarves at a steady jog being more like an endless avalanche of steel and muscle. But then again, why run when you can ride? I can only imagine that the first dwarves to ride in mechs must have been overjoyed with their invention.

He led me through a side door that opened only after he placed his palm to it, then up several flights of stairs and down a curving hallway made of polished granite. It was as smooth as any office building I remember from home, and out of idle curiosity, I traced my fingers over the surface. Not a bump, smooth as glass.

Dwarguy put his palm to another door, which opened up as easily as the first, and an elven woman with silky blonde hair which hung down to her waist, and long ears with double piercings through each, dressed in a red dress with white ruffles in a spiral pattern from her waist to her calves, stood up at once. “Dwarguy Davaran to see Mr. Schnee, it’s urgent, it cannae wait!” He snapped, and what I can only conclude was a receptionist or secretary stopped before the first word could come out past her ruby lipstick touched lips.

“Just a moment.” She said and went for yet another door. She knocked and bent forward so that she was looking relatively low on the door, and an uncomfortably long moment later a slat opened seemingly out of nowhere just in front of her lips.

“What?!” A rough voice asked and a bit of purple smoke drifted through the gap.

“Mr. Davaran is here for you, with a guest. He says it’s urgent.” She had a silky voice that I would dare call beautiful. I wondered if she might have been a singer in her free time.

“Send them in.” The rough voice answered and the door unlatched from the inside.

“He’ll see you.” She said and pressed her palm to the pad outside the door. It rose up into the ceiling and we were able to walk in.

Perhaps it’s an anime centric bigotry, perhaps it’s just the result of manga or novels, but I was expecting a gnome, or a dwarf, or even a very short human. A halfling even.

But I was not expecting to see the long hooked nose and green skin of a goblin wearing a bright red jacket with gold trim, a pocket watch, and dark black pants and polished black leather shoes. I definitely wasn’t expecting to see a diamond ring on his middle finger the size of my knuckle.

He had a white leaf rolled up and in his teeth, I could see the burning tip where it smoldered with red and yellow heat, the tendrils of purple smoke rose up around him, the walls and ceiling were faded from their original gloriously perfect pale white shades and were now nearly the color of the granite in the halls.

He walked with the expected gait of a goblin at least, a wide set of steps, his bald head partially covered with a top hat that tilted a little, while the back of his head had short straight black hair that stopped just below his pointed ears.

He went to his desk at a quicker step than I thought he might given his gait, then climbed up into an oversized wide backed chair that made him look even smaller than he naturally was. When he faced us again I noticed that the tophat had a round clock in the center, the time of which was several seconds ‘off’.

He removed the hat and set it down on the dark wooden desk in front of him then shouted, “Well? What do you want?!” As if we’d just been standing there with nothing to do but stare at him for hours.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Dwarguy Davaran seemed to take that in stride. “Thank you for removing the hat, sir.” He said with a deference I didn’t expect that he was capable of. He then launched without further preamble into the story, explaining ‘me’, what I saw, what I found, and the goblin’s dark eyebrows furrowed.

“We got that shipment not three days ago. Just today we got another. I was just getting ahead of my work with my hat, ordering an investigation to explain why we got two shipments of magitite ore…”

I sucked in my teeth.

The goblin slammed his fist down on the table, it rattled but did not crack, “Some bastard must have gotten a hold of their seal and forms and faked us out! Impersonated our provider to sell us a bunch of junk!”

I was more curious about the hat, the scenario he painted sounded true enough. A lot like the ticket seller who duped me, pretending to work there when he didn’t in order to charge an exorbitant fee.

“Right well, we’ll get to the bottom of that, you,” Mr Schnee jabbed his finger toward me, “probably saved me a lot of money, and saved the lives of a bunch of league pilots, they’re expensive, hard to replace, underworld knows what kind of damage losing them would do to the business.”

“You’re… welcome.” I said, I don’t know if I was being ‘thanked’ exactly. His ears twitched.

“Thanks is for friends, kitsune. This is business. You’re an adventurer, right?” He asked, and before I even finished nodding, he was already barrelling ahead with his words while he puffed on his white leaf. “Good, so I can put in an emergency request with the guild, you go down there and check the rest of the mechs, we’ll have the new ores put in in no time. It might delay the first matches, but hey, we’ll give the trash a discount on beer by about ten percent, they’ll drink two or three times as much, we come out ahead either way.”

“Aiko.” I said, “My name is Aiko.”

He narrowed his eyes up at me. “Aiko. You saw me right today. But don’t get it all mixed up. I’m Yorgim Schnee, you want to get anything done anywhere and I don’t want it to happen, every door stays closed to you, you don’t so much as get a bathroom door to open up. You keep seein me right, I can make you something worth noticing.”

I was fairly sure that with my magic and my form, I could easily take him. But… there’s a lot of kinds of power out there, and I guess… I just didn’t have the confidence to know I’d get away with antagonizing him. I’d lost money today just coming to take a tour.

Suffice it to say, my confidence wasn’t where I wanted to be. “I understand, Mr. Schnee, but um, how come you allow people to steal from you so much?”

His beady dark eyes narrowed his fingers closed over the white leaf and he jabbed it toward me in an angry gesture, “Listen, anyone can be stolen from, no matter how clever. The only way to make sure it don’t happen often, is to make em pay hard when they do. But there’s always another around the corner that the word didn’t reach or who thinks they’re special and can get away with it. This guy, we’ll get him, sooner or later.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” I said, and he cocked his head away from me and looked at Dwarguy.

“What’s the foxy girl talking about?” He demanded.

Dwarguy rubbed his temple and told Yorgim what I’d said outside.

“How much you lose?” He asked.

“Five thousand creds. Up from the five hundred he said he was going to charge me.” I felt pretty sore about that still, even if it wasn’t too much in the scheme of things.

He whistled. “Lotta creds for a fox girl with nothing hiding up her tail. You listen, I don’t do this for just anybody, but you, you took initiative out there. Letting you get robbed at my place of business isn’t a great opener.” He said and reached into his desk to pull out a slate. I held mine out by reflex.

I was starting to get used to relying on it. “There’s five thousand back, and, as a small ‘token’ of appreciation,” he said as he withdrew his slate and tapped on it a few times before making an expansive gesture with his spindly, silk clad arms, “You’ll be my personal guest at my reserved room in the Hotel Credati. Dinner and drinks included. All you’ve got to do is never mention where you got robbed, leave a description with the secretary, and go check all my people’s mechs.”

“Consider it done.” I said and when he held out his green hand to me, I remembered an old mobster movie, and when I took his hand, I kissed the ring on his finger.

The goblin’s face broke into a broad grin with his jagged teeth on display.

“This gal, she knows how to show respect. She might go far. You keep an eye on her, Davaran.”