The real estate agent was clearly moving from exasperation to outright ire.

Susannah needed a place to set things up, fast. Her expanded space was temporary, rented from a company that was, due to the nature and regulations of expanded space, the spatial equivalent of a back alley. It was accordingly shady, and despite promises it couldn’t hold the full contents of her café for long, regardless of the fact that it was rented for only a few more days.

As such, Susannah was a bit short tempered. Wrongfully, she acknowledged, but she was, and could not change that. The agent was clearly picking up on it, and getting annoyed.

“Look, I know this is a rush order, but please, I don’t need perfection, just a place that already has kitchen installations and a backroom.”

Rush order was a bit of a stretch. Susannah got in contact with Cydny at the crack of dawn today, had insisted that she needed a place before nightfall and would provide a bonus for it, given her a few hours to get things in order, and then they had gone through three tours in just under two hours.

It was amazing Cydny was doing as well as she was, really.

“I get it, I do,” Cydny said this through her teeth, “But getting real estate on short notice is difficult. The paperwork needed to own something most likely won’t have started to process by tomorrow. At the earliest. And with the budget you’re offering,” –Which was in fact rather generous, even for a city property, – “There’s just no way you can buy something by tomorrow, and I’m out of properties.”

Susannah stared her down. “So my options are mold central, a literal gingerbread bakery, or a condemned hovel in the adventurer’s district.” She did not consider the last one to be a real option.

“Not exactly.”

“Oh?”

“You could rent.”

Susannah blinked. This was not an option that had occurred to her. “Rent?”

“Yes. Sign a contract and pay money every month or so to someone who owns the building you’ll use for your… restaurant?”

“Café.” Susannah knew what renting was. She glared at the agent.

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

“Right. How about it?” Cydny was not intimidated. On the contrary, she was annoyed.

“Do you have a place in mind?”

“A few.”

“I’ll look, but no promises.” Susannah did not have high hopes. She was right to, as the first place Cydny led her to was a grungy, two story brick building. It was so nasty it was not covered in vandalism, but the refuse of vandalism. Small splatters of paint made faint by the filth, shards of empty metal cans impaled into the walls, and the smelly evidence of some unknowable drug. The neighborhood it was in was about the same.

“No.”

“You haven’t seen the inside.”

“No. This is worse than the hovel.”

Cydny smiled to herself. There was a plan for problem clients. “It’s starting to get late, how about one more for today?”

Susannah grimaced, but nodded. She could get a different agent tomorrow. “One more.”

They walked for thirty minutes. The streets tidied themselves up. There was no scattered glass or smells of obvious murder. In fact, the district Susannah was eventually led to felt, dare she think it, nice.

Eventually, Susannah stood in front of a building. It was two stories, like the last one, and very plain. Cydny pulled out a key and unlocked it. The inside was plain, too. It looked like it had been recently cleaned out. They went upstairs. Things continued to be normal.

“Okay, what’s the catch?”

“No catch. Do you want to look over the paperwork? We can start renting it today.”

“Who’s the landlord?”

“They’re presigned, and sent out to us.”

Susannah scowled. That felt sketchy. Too good to be true. But the last one was awful. If she turned this down, she wouldn’t get another chance. “I’ll look it over.”

Within an hour she was now proudly renting the place out. In retrospect, that was a red flag.

Cydny was pleased with herself. They never lasted long here. Goodbye, problem client.

As the door shut on her way out, all the light fixtures flickered ominously. Red flag number two. Things like that did not happen in perfectly good electrical systems unless they were setting a mood.

Susannah opened her bag of expanded space and dumped things out. She knew she had a candle somewhere, just in case, and she needed to set up the bedroom.

She could not find her candles. Nor could she find her favorite hat, her right leather glove, her potions cauldron, or her lunch sack. The shady expanded space company had eaten them.

This was obviously red flag number three. With the taking of her cauldron it was a sign from the universe that she could not brew or bake here, the glove to take her palm lines, showing a stolen fortune, the lost candles to show her way forward was now shrouded in the dark, her favorite hat to show that sombreros, like cafés without a lit-rpg element, were out of style.

Unfortunately, this was all told in a flashback, so Susannah could not have possibly known she was supposed to get out while she still could.