I left the noble district with all its protective stone and all that good stuff. Clause was fine… Now, Anna was doing her thing, and everything was fine.
Very fine.
Well… Everything except the situation.
One might call that less than very fine. Perhaps terrible even, assuming they were so out of touch with reality as to be clinically insane. I could, of course, tell just how bad it was, and that was probably an understatement by a few orders of magnitude, even for the clinically insane. How could I tell? It was deafening. It was loud and negative, all the worse since I became aware of what I had to assume was my soul being flayed by a fucking skeleton.
Gods, but that alone was bad enough; it had been a shredding pain that had left me in the state to just lay down and cackle like a madman, at least until it had stopped, which left me with ash in my mouth, and empty heart and a hyper-aware.
It was too much.
So off I went to get some more because if it was too much for me, it was absolutely too much for Joan, and I needed to make sure she was okay... Physically ok, anyway. She was not okay with the situation, and I could feel that. Joan was a soft person, which was not a bad thing. Everyone needed someone who liked hugs and had a big heart, and that was Joan. She wasn't used to the unbridled emotions of others like I was, and now she was stuck in a living nightmare, so I intended to help her. I liked Joan; her being in pain left me in pain, especially because she so often was a beacon of joy, a bright, nurturing light, and I needed a little of that right now.
She was in the mercantile district, with the caravansary and the market, her presence emanating emotional distress as I went through the streets in a quest to find and shelter her.
The city left me raw, especially in my hyper-sensitive state, where every wafting emotion, mostly fear, pain and desperation, felt overwhelming, so overwhelming I couldn’t let my mental guard down. Even with that mental wall, I could feel it like a legion of [Stonemasons] desperately chiselling through it, a constant tick, tick, tick of tiny hammers desperately carving without end. It made my heart beat so hard it physically hurt. The sensation was to use a simple simile, like suffering a migraine, heart attack, panic attack, and aneurism simultaneously while in a room of screaming banshees. Each twitch winge and flair was fueled by the emotions of others that floated around like clouds of poisonous gas.
Said banks of volatile gas hugged the ground, rolling over the pavers, invisible to all. In places, they merged, and where I found those loci, I dispersed them with prejudice, reaching out to disperse them and, in doing so, getting them on me, letting them in.
My skill was instrumental in avoiding the worst of the city so I could make my way quickly to my desired destination. It was, in fact, so helpful that most of my journey was spent dispelling pools of negativity. Meeps were made from raw emotion, from primordium, and sook those with the same energy. Joan was joyful and had positive emotions most of the time, and she surrounded herself with said meets, but there was no joy here, and these meeps posed a danger.
And that was before you considered that the average person couldn’t stop them from rooting on them or prevent infestation. Meeps could do lots of good, encouraging their emotions like joy or hope, but they could stop an ordinary person from being able to process their feelings nor recover from them if, say, a depression meep rooted in them while they grieved.
If it went on long enough, or enough meeps rooted, they could become infested, and that was even worse. You couldn’t save an infested person. They were just like that… Forever. They became like Joan or I, sensitive to the unseen maelstrom of primordium but ravenous, more meep than man. I sometimes wondered what primordium must be: condensed emotional energy, unlike mana, which was… well, I don’t know. If mana was natural, primordium was the opposite of that.
If thinking beings produced it, and thinking beings were natural, why was primordium different than mana? Stranger still was how mutually exclusive they were. I had but a shell around me to hid my emptiness. Whatever mana was, it was unimportant to me. Far from the lifeblood that gave people power, it gave me nothing, if anything it made me weaker. Twice, I stopped to pull out rooted meeps; whatever a fear meep made, it wouldn’t happen on my watch. Clearing them, however, was blessedly simple. All I had to do was walk up to my targets and thrust my hand into the meeps' heads before gripping them with my pointer finger and thumb, giving a tug, and plucking them off before casting their shattering form back into raw primordium.
They broke into dust, sublimating into less primordium than it would have taken to make them. That was the good news about these things; at least you could eliminate them with time and effort. The bad news? By the time I had made it to Joan, I had cleared thirty spawning pools, smashed a half dozen volatile meeps, and de-rooted two people.
All on a short jaunt from the center of the city to the merchant quarter.
It took me a while once I got there to find my friend, wandering back and forth before I spotted Joan. Or rather, I spotted the lack of her, a space left suspiciously blank. She was using the same trick I did to keep others from spotting me, with the added trick of warding away primordium with a bubble. It left a hole in my senses that was hard to remember when I stopped thinking on it, but it didn't work perfectly when you knew about it.
Her meeps were also standing next to an empty area, their large head and doll-sized bodies like little knights as they formed a vigil, guarding their far larger mistress. To give away exactly where she was.
I gave them each a little pat and closed my eyes, following my sense of where she was. My legs shuffled forward until I was close enough to reach out with a hand and break the effect. I groped around until I found her head, her hair drifting through my fingers as I centered myself, slowing my breathing as I reached back and found it again. I reached out around me and found the primordium in the air as it wove around her, held by tethers to the figure of a girl. I lightly brushed the tendrils that touched me aside.
Then I opened my eyes, and Joan was there.
Joan was slumped, hands pressed to her temples, her face pressed toward her knees, huddling with her knees to her chest like she was cold. She looked miserable, but it was Joan, the real Joan, and nothing but the real Joan. She was curled tightly, sniffling, elbows into her gut tightly like she was trying to press her arms into her chest, short sucking breaths intermixed with the sniffles as she hyperventilated quietly.
Her hair was a mess, but I didn’t pull back my hand; I was arguably more of a mess, so instead of getting her dirtier, I just sat down next to her and let her know I was there for her in the same way I knew she was here for me. At the same time, I became a quivering mess for a bit, letting the two of us deal with the overload of negativity while I shielded us from the constant haze. Joan was far above the more capable one when it came to skill and ability, but being a metaphorical hulking brute with a club and enough skill to use it had its perks.
Everyone needed a good cry every once in a while. In our case, it was a nice refreshing minute before it started to rain, and a bunch of crazy shit popped off around the family estate. Joan couldn’t feel it, but I didn’t care, so we sat there regardless of the rain, me covering her as best as I could without a cloak.
The rain cooled our skin but quite quickly became overwhelming, going from a spit to rain to a torrent, soaking into our clothes and pulling grime from our hair. But we let it wash away all manner of grit and heat until we were actually cold, Joan shivering and leaning into me in a way I would say I didn’t like, even if it was a lie.
We waited in silence. You needed a few words when it was all emotion, and your emotions were on display, but Joan broke the silence first.
“Thanks,” Joan said.
“No problem, I’ll always be here, or so long as you want me to be here,” I told her.
“Well, I suppose you make a good shoulder,” she said before she let out a sniffle.
“A good shoulder?” I asked, taken aback. “Surely, I’m more than that… A great shoulder, at the very least, if I do say so myself, I make a half-decent cloak, too.”
“Good cloaks would keep the rain out,” she said, looking down at herself, “and I’m soaked… You make a bad rain cloak… Though that’s not the metric I would use to judge you. Where did this rain come from?” she asked, sniffling again, licking her dry lips which led me to lick my dry lips.
The shock would play hell on buildings with how fast the temperature had changed. No doubt a handful of [Carpenters] would make a killing on anything bigger than a nail that needed tapping down… Especially because so many buildings had been destroyed.
“Anna, I think. Something big just happened back home,” I told her, feeling out toward the estate and feeling confusion, pain, fear and overwhelming euphoria. A strange combo, to be sure. “I think Clause is high right now.”
She sighed, murmuring, “So you’re going to be off again? You’ve come and saved me, and now Clause needs help.”
“No.” I told her, “No. I don’t want any more chores for today; I believe I’ll stay with you.”
“Better than chores, am I?” Joan asked, though in a way that told me, ‘comparing me to chores? Am I such a bore?’
“Far better. I enjoy spending time with you. I’ve given Clause his time, but I won’t trade my time with you for Clause, not even for his hairline.” I told her my words, reassuring her.
“There's nothing wrong with your hair, Strause, besides how dirty it is,” she told me as grit flowed off my hair and onto her smock, which got her looking down at the grime.
I tilted my head away from her and took a few futile swipes to brush some of the wet lampblack and ash from my hair.
“Oh… come on, Joan, I could log a tree with it,” I told her, making a chopping motion with my hand. I managed to catch a little glimmer of a smile, some joy shining through the swirl of pain like the shimmer of a gem shining in the rough before I made to stand and told her, “Now, let’s get you out of the rain before you catch your death.”
“It would be a shame to die tonight,” she agreed, her voice more controlled now, “a poor time to die all around, honestly. Everyone’s going to need a mass grave. With all this rain, they won’t be able to cut enough timber. Fires won’t get hot enough.”
She said it dryly, almost in a way that could pass as a joke, but it was hiding the unsaid, ‘I’d hate to be a burden on my family.’
“Oh… We both know you can’t bury that many people; we don’t have [Gravediggers] for that… Actually, we do have one… She is going to be so busy. Though that’s beside the point because you’re far too alive to be dead,” I told her with a light side hug.
“She is, isn’t she? Poor girl.” She commented, “Thankfully, I am still far too alive to be dead and take up her time, which would be a shame. I don’t think I would look as good dead,” she said with the same tone as I had, mirroring me, “Though at the moment I don’t think I’m looking much better.”
“I have to agree,” I told her, standing up with her, “I think you’re far more fun and fetching alive. Why, I do say, you moving right now is quite attractive compared to the alternative,” I told her, knocking her head with mine.
“I’m glad you think so. I think life looks quite fetching on you, too,” she said, to which I ignored the extra context.
I was a bit cagy about where it led because it was a place where I could misuse my power, and while I was ok with being looked down upon, I wasn’t with using power. She gave me a look because she knew how I felt about that, and I gave her a look because I knew that she knew and knew how she felt about how I felt because nothing could truly be hidden between us.
Like the many times we argued about it without speaking or directly making eye contact, she gave me a minor hit to the ribs, which hit me in my bruised rib.
“Ow,” I said, “You hit my bruise, and now it's going to bruise. That’s a double bruise.”
“I would kiss it better, but you’re allergic to cooties, so it would do more harm than good.” She told me dryly. Much of the turmoil I could feel from her was buried in favor of an annoyed spark amongst the myriad emotions that raced through her.
“Never found a [Alchemist] who could make a cure for cooties,” I told her, “What if I gave you boy cooties? Yuck.”
The topic was getting a bit childish, but we didn’t even need to use words, so we could talk about things however we wanted to. We once talked about this in the context of different dogs, mundane house items like candles, and even in half-baked ‘nu-uh and yah-uh’s’ like we were eight.
Mentioning cooties like we were nine was, by contrast, a mature way of discussing us for us.
“What if I want boy cooties?” She asked, “You’re ignoring that you’re afraid of giving exactly what I want.”
“Boy cooties are for boys,” I told her, much to her disgruntlement.
Joan, disgruntled as she was, let me take the lead while hiding under my arm, and the both of us, wet to the bone by pounding rain, shuffled off toward a gathering where we might find something to warm our bones. Stumbling around, we found ourselves coming up to an inn that favored [Merchants] that was still open.
Joan was insistent that we get out of the rain, we might as well get warm.
We probably would have gotten weird looks, but I was still shielding us; we walked past crowds unseen. We were recovering, standing next to each other, hearts as one. It was easy to fall into what we had between us, our unseen similarities drew us to one another.
The [Caravan Guards] had clearly outdone themselves to protect their goods, and I could only imagine them scrambling to keep goods out of the rain. I paid for a night and got us into our room because I was rich, and Joan was cold, with her mocking my chivalry all the while. I had tried to get two, but Joan had gotten her word in first. A fireplace lit the room, and we basked in its calm warmth for a few moments.
We got a few chairs pulled over, and I got us some towels to dry off. Then, we rested next to the fire in a state of undress towels thrown over us like cloaks while we shivered.
“So…” Joan asked, “What have you been doing besides getting yourself in trouble anyway.”
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I sighed before thinking it over to give her what she really wanted.
“I got my soul skinned by an undead while holding a checkpoint and got lugged around like furniture before dragging my brother home like it was a rowdy night instead of him being half dead,” I told her as succinctly as I could. “What did you get up to?” I asked back.
“Oh? I’m glad you seem to be alright. I was knitting doilies and being a gods-fearing young woman. The usual,” she said, sighing and adjusting herself.
“Oh? The usual?” I asked her.
“Yeah. Helping out in any way I can…” she said, a silent, ‘so not much of any good, I’m afraid...’ left between the lines as she muttered, “might as well have stayed home and knit myself a new blanket.”
“I’m sure you did your best. Doing our best is all we can do,” I told her, gesturing to myself self-depreciatively. An attempt at lightening her self-depreciation because we were in this clusterfuck called life together, and if she was going to talk herself into a pit, I would too until she pulled the both of us out.
“Oh, I did a great job. I managed to have a complete meltdown and cut everyone out... Everyone! My family forgot I existed… They still probably do. They just walked away, confused, like they had left food on the stove. I don’t even know if they’re alive.” She told me, her skill in muting her face, but not the sniff.
I took her head in my hand, pulling it into my shoulder while stroking her hair.
I set my senses, searching for the familiar feelings of her family. I had been near enough to them to get a sense of them, an insight that let me narrow down on them.
“They are. Your pops was hurt I think, but it's more likely a stubbed toe than anything bad.” I told her, wincing as I felt something I didn’t want to as I reached out through the world, since extending out from me, “Though I do have some less pressing bad news... Or good, possibly. Mostly bad for you... and probably me.”
Sucking in breaths, relief and release in equal measure, she managed to choke out, “What now? What could possibly make today any worse?”
“I’m fairly sure you’re going to be an aunt,” I told her, a bit of disgust in my voice as I did my best to avoid the cloud of lust around one of her sisters and the man with her.
Very gross. Thank you, gods, I hate it.
“Great.” She said, knowing full well that it would set off a whole load of problems. “Can you go get me a mug?”
“There’s a bucket right there if you need to hurl that badly,” I told her, to which she pushed out of my shoulder and pushed a finger into my forehead.
I leaned back because that’s what I did. When she pushed, I let her because I had enough issues with having absolute power over people, and Joan was my way of indulging in a controlled lack of that power.
“I meant to get a drink,” she told me, “I could use one.”
“Food?” I asked.
“Not hungry,” she told me.
“I suppose I could go for a drink too,” I told her, “I’ll go get us a pitcher,” and in saying that, slipping up from my seat and heading out into the lobby to fetch a pitcher and mugs for two along with some food because when you had the option, you brought food anyway.
Why women did that, I had no idea; not even my powers of literally reading their surface thoughts could shake it loose, but I had enough of Joan eating my food, and she was hungry, and it was two silver for the lot anyway, so I quite frankly didn’t give a damn.
I spent the time reaching out toward home, trying to figure out what the hell was going on over there by feel. It was undoubtedly a complicated set of emotions that I could only hope would pass but knew wouldn’t. Confusing nightmare.
“Gods save me from idiots in love and idiots out of it,” I muttered before picking up our food and drink and carefully bringing it back on a tray. The confused server was unsure of what I was talking about, but the tray was in my hand before he figured he should say anything and let me be.
Entering the room, Joan was still seated, a towel up and over her head, blanket around her body, the firelight casting her in contrast. I placed the tray on the bed and handed her a mug before dragging an end table over to our seats.
“You got a lot of food,” she said, pointing to the plate.
“Yep. I’m a growing boy, and I need my food. Didn’t think the servings would be so big, so you can steal some from me if you’re hungry,” I told her.
“I’m not,” she lied, taking a spoon for the stew. “Those are big bowls, though, so I suppose I can help.”
“Yeah, they came with the drink… Let me get some for you,” I said, sitting back down and filling our cups.
She hummed knowingly. She could tell I was lying, but she would still take my food because, of course, she was hungry. She appreciated it, and I appreciated that she wasn’t stealing my food. Money well spent.
I gave her a look of, ‘Sure you’re not,’ and she returned it with a look of her own that said, ‘I’m not going to admit to shit,’ that didn’t end even when she raised her mug and continued to give me the stare.
I returned it, giving my best stare, and neither of us wanted to back down first. We were both wide-eyed and stared into one another's eyes, even when we went to drink, tilting our heads to pour our drink into our mouths without breaking eye contact because we were morons.
We did it until Joan spilled a little drink on herself, and I looked down and spotted what Joan had wanted me to see, which got me sighing.
Joan was smart. Joan was clever. Joan had dressed herself down while I was out and played me into looking at her chest, which was covered by only a wet white smock.
“Joan… Why are you wearing only your smock?” I asked her, doing my best not to spot the pronounced shapes beneath the wet, transparent white fabric.
“I was just making sure you actually liked women,” she told me. You do, right?” She asked just as much about her chest as the question she had asked.
“Yes,” I told her, putting down my mug and rubbing my eyes, “My blood is red, and I’m interested in women. They’re very nice, Joan, but I’m not going to lose myself in a moment of lust because of a sneak peek of your chest like a teenager. What's going on with this? What's gotten you pushing again? Is it your sister?” I asked her.
It was a tale as old as… Well, as old as three years ago when she had gotten her class and I had noticed it, and she had developed a crush on the bigger, older me. It had been a teenage crush, then a less teenage crush, and now it was something that stood between us as she continued to mature.
“Strause, my parents have been trying to match me with someone for three years.” She told me seriously, “The second they find out they have a grandchild on the way, they’re going to get worse. I just don’t want to end up hitched to a random chump with no prospects who can’t understand me. I would prefer being with you over whoever my parents could rope into ‘taking care of me.’”
“And you thought that you would try intriguing me with your chest? Ouch, Joan.” I told her.
“Well, someone has to make the first move, and it certainly wasn’t going to be you. I know you’re interested, I know you’re not going to make the first move, and I’m starting to run out of patience with your hangups, which are the only thing stopping this from happening.” She said, a finger flicking back and forth between us. “You need to either stop leading me on or get over your weird power hangups. So are you interested, or are you not?”
She was going for the jugular on that one, giving me an ultimatum, but it was also going too quickly.
“Joan, I don’t think it's appropriate for me to-” I started, only for her to cut me off, terse but evenly.
“It's not appropriate for you to lead people on. That’s not appropriate, Strause. Don’t play with me, and don’t talk about how you’re a big, strong older nobleman, and how you have a higher level and blah blah blah. Gods, coming from anyone else, each of those things is a humble brag. Do I need to be able to pin you to a bed before you decide that you're not holding power over me? You’re so tied up in not overusing it that you’re afraid of using it at all.”
“Would you rather I be the kind of noble that abuses his power?” I asked her pointedly.
“That’s beside the point, Strause,” she said, standing up and placing her hands on my shoulders, “You’re trying to live by a set of morals where you think you can do no harm, but you need to be able to do harm. You’ve tied yourself into a knot. You’re afraid.”
I didn’t really have an easy way out of this because she had hit the nail on the head.
“I enjoy spending my time with you, Joan. I do. I let you set the pace… I don’t want to push you past a line I can’t see. I don’t want to live in a world where I’ve misused my power. If that makes me a cowardly man, then I’m indeed a craven…”
Leaning in, she looked me dead in my eyes, the blanket falling away, arms wrapping around my neck. Close enough to feel her breath, nose to nose. Close enough to kiss. Our wet clothes hide nothing, every curve on display.
I held tightly to my control, to my thoughts to keep my head.
“So? Let me set the pace. Pay attention to me. You’re good enough at it to read me. Let loose; let me be your break. I need to know if you’re going to let me in, and I need to know now. No dodging, no changing the topic. Are you interested in me? Are you interested in this?” She asked.
I opened my mouth and found that I couldn’t find my voice.
What would I say? I was interested in it, and I didn’t want to abuse my power over her, a power she was willing to control? How? I was taller, stronger, of noble lineage, had more levels and was teaching her... Even if it was more of a time we would hang out with one another. I was more powerful than her in literally any way you could measure it, and she seemed not to care; she thought she could control that. I could shatter her mind, I could tangle her into a toy, or isolate her, or take advantage of her and her family or worse, and she seemed to not care.
I wouldn’t lie to her; I was interested. Joan was an easy seven on a bad day; she was a seven while covered in grime and wet. Sitting on me, it was hard enough to keep my mind the right way around. I enjoyed talking with her, and the idea of sharing my life with her. She was attractive, she liked me, and I liked her. We understood one another, and she was right about why I was hesitant.
I could see the tension she hid, feel it in her arms, and feel the tension she tried to hide in her emotions. I could tell that if I decided to put my morals above her, that would be that, and we would drift apart, and rightly so. In her shoes, what would I do? Sit around for a boy to decide to man up, assuming he ever did?
So tell her and break my moral compass… Or rebuff her… Which would also break something far more meaningful to me.
Who would I be without my morals?
No… That wasn’t the right question. Was this even against my morals?
She was asking if I was interested in her, and as far as I cared, telling her the truth wasn’t particularly immoral. I just couldn’t do many other things that could be associated with exerting power over her. If she was willing to let me run loose, tell me when to reel it in, and when to stop being uptight, there wasn’t anything wrong with that… Surely.
“I am,” I told her, reaching out and placing a hand on her hip, her wet smock cool but warming underhand. “I’m interested. Joan, you're attractive, you’re funny, and you have wit. You’re fun to be around, and I enjoy being next to you, rain or shine. I would love to just let my morals drop, but I’m worried that I’ll end up doing wrong by you. If you’re going to be my brakes, I need you to be my brakes… I need you to be a peer… I just don’t know how.”
Joan, tense little Joan, lit up—not her face, not her body language, but her—the real her that we could feel, a light hope growing in her as I spoke—hope, joy, and a bit of conspiracy.
It was like a light, one that could light up everything around her. She curled her head down to my neck, contracting herself onto me and slipping into my lap, guided there by a kind of pull that I could feel deep within me.
Soul deep. A drag of me to her, her to me. Our differences draw us together.
“Good. It's about time you tell me. It’s felt like you’ve been stringing me along for long enough… I understand you have reservations, more so about what we can do than about the little things.” She whispered to me, “So… I have come up with a simple plan to help with that.”
Letting my hands slip around her waist and doing my best to keep Strause Jr. from waking up, I told her, “I… How? What's your plan, Joan.”
I kind of slipped my head over her shoulder, our heights being level while she lay in my lap. I didn’t know what to do with my head, though; I kind of just extended my neck over her shoulder like I was hugging her, which was a novel sensation... Mostly in the proximity of our lower halves.
“It’s quite novel, I think,” she told me teasing me, though physically.
“Oh? This is quite novel already, what with an attractive woman sitting in my lap, whispering her plans in my ear like a seductress. Do spill the tea,” I told her, projecting my uncertainty.
“It's simple, really. I doubt a noble like you, with your plots and schemes and spys-” she said.
“I don’t have spy’s,” I mumbled.
She ignored me, chuckling, “I know why you visit ladies of the night, and it isn’t for back rubs or sex… Now, luckily, the plan is simple. I’m going to level. I’m going to go out and level like a madwoman. I’m going to become more powerful than you, so much so that you won’t be able to lay a finger on me. If you’re not powerful enough to control me, you have no reason to worry about abusing it.”
“That’s all good, but how exactly are you going to out-level me? Do you have a war brewing? A spell that makes you level? Oh, gods, don’t tell me you figured out how to summon a demon or something. I like my partners with a soul, you know.” I told her.
She snorted, “I’m not going to sell my soul to the dark one, Strause. Though the divine is part of it…”
I pulled back, confused by her words. Her words spoke of one thing, but my feeling of conspiracy had grown.
“What? Are you off to a nunnery? Do we have those?” I asked her.
She chuckled next to my ear, her voice driving me mad with confusion. It made us want to look her in the eye as if that would somehow elucidate to me what she was doing. I found my hands cinched her waist, holding her close and possessively.
“Calm yourself,” she murmured into my ear, “I’m not going to become a [Nun]. Could you even believe that? No, gods, no. I’m going to follow a certain servant of the divine. Haven’t you noticed yet? She’s grown, Strause. She becomes more… Tangible? More real? More important, by the day. By the day! Can you believe that? So has your sister and that little Sprite thing. Everyone around her levels like I can’t believe. So… I’m going to hang up my towel, and [Barmaid] get up with my parents, and go stand next to her and suck some of that madness up.”
“That’s…” I started, unable to find a good word for that weirdly specific kind of idea.
“I understand there’s no guarantee, but I’m willing to try it for a bit and see where it takes me… Now, there’s something I need to bring to your attention.” She told me seriously.
“More serious than a hair-brained scheme to siphon levels from my sisters… Roommate?” I asked her, trying to say anything that wasn’t rude.
“Nice save,” she told me, “Though I don’t know why you care so much about what to call her. You could call them lovers, after all.”
I snorted. My sister? Yeah right. “They cuddle at best,” I told her.
“True enough.” She admitted, “That point aside, I think we need to have a good long think about what we do next.”
“What we do next?” I asked.
“It’s been a long night. We’re tired and stressed and wet. I need to blow off a little steam, Strause, and I can tell we could both use this. This little fire won’t dry us off anytime soon… And we have the room for the night, so how about we test this out?”
There it was.
I sighed, “Joan…”
“We need to know if we're compatible, Strause… And besides, you want it just as much as I do,” she said moodily, pressing herself down on my lap. “I want to finally get it over with. Don’t make me beg Strause. That would be such a disappointment after you finally started to man up.”
I knew she was poking at me with her man comments, but I also knew she knew it would be pointless, which made it a roundabout compliment.
“Oh? And somehow, giving in to all your demands would make me more of a man?” I asked her.
“Well… Yes?” she said, trying to play it off, “I mean… I’m yours so long as you’re mine. So if you were to stake your claim while I’m on my back, that would be very manly.”
“Ah yes…” I told her, “The masculine urge to treat women like property, like a parcel of land or a lounging chair.”
“Now, now… I’m not suggesting that you treat me like a lounge chair… More like a bed or a pillow. I want you to put me down flat and lay on top of me and wrestle with me until we're both sweaty and I’m covered in you.” She told me, voice sensual in a way that bypassed me and went straight down my spine.
I was starting to get worried. That was very out of context for Joan, very off.
“Joan, what exactly are you asking me to do in this case?” I asked her, “And be specific. There are some lines I just won’t cross, not even for you.”
“Well, if I need to be so vulgar as to say it… I want you to pin me down on that bed and make me shout so loud the other guests complain. I want you to-”
Joan told me what she wanted, and while I deliberated, it was a quick deliberation. Morals aside, I had a naked woman on my lap. What was a man to do?
Who was I without my morals? A danger, but a danger with a relationship, and that wasn't a bad thing. My morals needed to be flexible, or I would be moral and alone, and people weren't meant to be alone. Morals were made by people, and people changed.
My morals were all about me, but this wasn't about me; it was about us. You couldn't spell moral without Or, it wasn't a yes/no kind of deal... You also couldn't spell moral without oral, which would get a chuckle from Joan after I had rehearsed it.
So, I altered my morals to include Joan, and I gave her what she wanted, because morals wouldn't make me happy, even if they made me feel safe.
***
“Holy cow,” I said to myself, watching as, for once, one of the Mynes siblings got laid.
“My goodness, it's like watching a baby bird fly from the nest… Well, that’s one sibling down. I wish Anna and Saphine had half that straightforwardness… Or Clause… Goodness gracious.” I said to myself
I watched, amazed that one of them had finally had enough guts to just get laid. Then it kind of went weird, and I started focusing more on their souls as they did weird stuff, and then it got very boring, and all that was left was the act of meat on meat, and I lost interest.
“Well… Time to go before their little friend comes on over and decides I look tasty…” I murmured, shuttering at the thought.
I really didn’t like those guys. As far as spirits went, they were just far too broad to be predictable. Honestly? Three hundred sixty-five types? Far too many; you never knew what you were going to get when it came to an Archon; they could be kind and benevolent or a raging murder monster; even the young ones that walked around unaware were freaky.
And so, tip-toeing away from my peeping position, I made my way around to my sleeping charges, slipping in and out of dreams and making my daily bread.
Anna got several class levels, as did Clause, Strause and Joan if their version of a guide coming meant anything. The world whispered into sleep as people began to huddle or return to burnt-out buildings. Some left, their lives over, spinning out into the dark to become [Bandits], while others pulled together. Some wept alone, others let out their grief together, some slunk through the dark, the [Guards] spread too thin to stop [Thieves], but most did not because tonight was a night to mourn the departed.
For tomorrow, there would be work. The bodies needed collecting, wood needed cutting, fires needed stoking, cloaks needed oiling, and money didn’t care that your family died. Money had no heart.
And alone in her room, Saphine freaked out over what she would do tomorrow.