“Stop!” I shouted towards the girls, hoping to keep them back so I could retreat if my shifted arm proved unable to damage the statues. Meanwhile, I adjusted to menace the statues with the shifted limb and ensure that I was directly between the two statues and the girls. I took up a familiar fencing stance presenting my right side to maximize the range of my shifted limb.
The two statues, which had been moving forward with their weapons raised menacingly, froze in place.
I could hear the girls speaking behind me, but their words did not make sense as the golem to my right began to speak in a surprisingly high-pitched tone.
“Cadence recognized. Scanning. Please submit a longer voice sample.”
“Uhh…” I mumbled intelligently before a sudden movement out of the corner of my eye got my attention.
Turning my head, I saw Rieka brandishing her spell rod and jumped to stop her. “Wait, don’t attack them yet!”
Rieka, who had been partway through the gesture to make her attack spell, stopped and waited. Her pointed, canine ears were trained on the golems and her tail was stiff behind her in anger.
“You understand what they are saying?” Rieka asked a moment later, and I nodded dumbly.
“Yeah, they asked me for a larger voice sample.” I glanced over my shoulder at the statues that remained still, their weapons held ready and the rubies that made up their eyes still shimmering with light. “How long of a voice sample do you require?”
“Sample accepted. Trait recognized. Traveler override engaged,” the left-hand statue spoke this time, and its voice was the same high-pitched tone as its companion.
Together, the two golems stepped backwards into their alcoves before assuming their relaxed stance and closing their eyes. The deafening silence only had a second to settle in once the statues had retired before my dwarf lamia lover spoke up and broke it.
“What did they say?”
I was busy staring at the statues at first, so I didn’t respond immediately.
Traveler override? What the hell? What could that mean? Did a Traveler build this complex?
As the questions swirled through my mind at a rapid pace, the gentle pressure of the girls leaning into me startled me out of my reverie. Kassandra was pressed to my lower back and I could feel her left arm wrapping around my waist. Rieka tucked herself under my left arm and against my front. Both girls still had their spell rods out and trained on the statues.
The evident desire of the girls to be close to me, combined with the vague memory of Kassandra’s question, brought me back to myself once more.
“They said something about accepting the voice sample and engaging a ‘Traveler override’, then just went still. You mean that you girls couldn’t understand them?” I felt Rieka shake her head in response to my question. None of us appeared willing to take our eyes off the still statues.
“No, it sounded like a rather guttural language, somewhat similar to Dwarven. Traveler override?” Kassandra was the one to speak up next, and I felt the arm wrapped around me tighten against my stomach. “Do you think it’s safe? Does this override give you access?”
I considered her question for a moment before shrugging.
“Let’s find out. You two stand ready to cover me if they start moving again, but keep well back. If they do try to attack, I need room to retreat.”
“Be careful, Liam,” Rieka whispered before shifting away. Kassandra squeezed my stomach again, whether to reassure me or herself I wasn’t sure, before she backed up to give me room.
Approaching the two stationary golems once more, I kept the armored talon that had replaced my right hand ready and coiled to strike. But the statues did not respond. They remained stationary, with their hammers held in front of them the entire time. Even when I reached forward to lay my hand on the metal door that they stood on either side of.
Though I about shit my pants when the door let out a loud clank when my hand contacted it and swung inward on squeaky hinges.
I jumped back and got ready to defend myself, but the sentinel golems did not react to the noise, or the movement. The hanging lights that filled the room we were in currently did not carry into the other room, only what light fell past me to reveal a pristine floor paved in white marble.
“Liam?” Rieka called curiously, and I held up a hand to quiet her for a moment. Using the greater length of my shifted right arm, I pushed the metal door until it was fully open and then rolled my light stone into the room.
It illuminated rows and rows of shelves in a room that was maybe twenty feet square. The shelves were constructed of black metal and held collections of small crates that mostly sat empty. Against the far wall was another set of shelves that had a dozen or so glass jars on them and a number of small objects piled on the lower shelves. But besides that, there was nothing in the room. No golems, no corpses, or even a speck of dust.
Glancing over my shoulder at the girls, I held up a hand to keep them back for another moment before I turned back to the statues guarding the door. Lifting my right arm/tail, I poked one in the cheek with the chitinous tip. The sharp tip scraped over the stone, leaving a light scratch behind. The statue itself did not move or react.
“Okay, come on up. Just be slow about it. If they wake up, be ready to fall back,” I called to the girls.
Despite my request to be slow, both of my girls rushed up to me. Kassandra to peer at the statues and Rieka to inspect the room. My light stone had come to a stop just off center of the room and was casting bizarre shadows all over because of the shelving.
Neither of the statues reacted to their approach.
Bolstered by the inaction of the golems, I led the girls past them. Once we were through the door, the girls both relaxed, but I kept a wary eye back on the statues while they looked around.
Kassandra went to the right and began peering into the ancient crates and boxes on the shelves. Like the storage area outside, this room seemed to have been spared the ravages of time for the most part, with the wooden boxes only showing the faintest hint of their age in the gray color they were taking on.
Rieka kept close to me, intent on covering my back while our companion poked around. She would peek into the open-topped boxes as we passed them, but wasn’t searching as much as Kassandra was.
“What’s in here, anyway?” I asked, bending over to scoop up my light stone. The girls still had theirs and were using them to light the way, but having my own source of light was reassuring. I could have shifted my eyes, but decided against it for the moment.
“Looks mostly like ritual components,” Kassandra called from part way down one aisle. “I’ve got jars of aromatic resins here. The box before it had non-magical crystals.
“Chalks here. Though from the texture they are alchemically created, not naturally occurring.” Rieka held up a thick stick of dark-blue chalk that she had fished from a box at her side and I could see what she meant. It had an almost waxy look to it, rather than the dusty texture I was used to.
Experimentally, Rieka made a slight mark on the black metal of the shelf with the chalk and it left an almost perfect line on the metal. She then tried to smudge it with the heel of her hand and, while it would smudge, it took far more effort than chalk normally did. “Huh, that’ll be handy. Hang on, I’ll grab these.”
The girls continued to check through shelves and pick off bits and pieces of useful items, but nothing that was noticeably valuable in its own right. That was until we got towards the back of the room.
Kassandra had just found an intricately carved iron bowl that was as large as her cupped hands and stashed it in Rieka’s bag, saying that it was likely a ritual offering bowl and they needed to study it more, when I spotted a familiar shape.
Roughly a third the size of a cell phone each, the squat stacks of metallic bars were set on a lower shelf in one corner. They were stacked in orderly rows and the light shimmered off their surfaces despite patches of tarnish discoloring their faces.
“Rieka,” my one word statement got the wolf-eared woman’s attention. She turned from the crate full of glass jars to follow my pointing finger and her sky-blue eyes widened in surprise.
Pushing the box back on the shelf, she hurried past me to inspect the find. The sudden movement drew Kassandra to her, and the two of them bent to inspect the small ingots tucked on the shelf.
“This is gold. I’m sure of it.” I heard Rieka mumble as she hefted one bar that barely filled her petite hand. The bright, buttery yellow metal shimmered with only the faintest hints of tarnish at its edges. An unfamiliar stamp was pressed into the face, showing a mountain with a spear protruding from the side of it and then a collection of numbers under that.
“There’s silver here too,” Kassandra hummed from where she was headfirst in the shelf. The tip of her serpentine tail was flicking back and forth in excitement. “None of these are mana charged, but these ingots are good-sized and there are plenty of them. Split up, this is a good haul even if Rieka just gets the mint to buy them. Not to say what a collector might pay for them.”
A shimmer of rainbow light caught my attention as the girls began stuffing the roughly playing-card deck sized ingots into Rieka’s bag. Stepping past the shelf the girls were emptying, I came to a stop by the back wall of the small room.
There were two sets of long shelves set against the back wall. Mostly empty, there were four flat boxes roughly the size of a traditional cigar-box and stained in dark colors on one shelf of the right-hand one. Set on the left-hand shelf were several glass jars that looked empty, despite being tightly sealed with elaborately engraved lids.
The shimmer that caught my attention came from one of the boxes though, as it was sitting propped open. The boxes were set in a row and it was the third from the left that was propped partially open.
Inside the box was a blue velvet bed that held about a dozen large, octagonal coins scattered around randomly. They had the same mountain-and-spear imprint on them and had a hole about as thick as a pencil punched through the center of them. They vaguely reminded me of ancient oriental coins. But what was more important was the oil-slicks shimmer of mana that covered the coins in a thin film.
“Oh sweet. Hey I found some mana silver here, girls.” The words were barely out of my mouth before Kassandra was already pushing between me and the shelf to have a look.
My mischievous lover couldn’t do anything normally, so rather than sliding around my side, she apparently decided the most expedient way of getting close enough to examine my find was to dive between my legs and come up that way between me and the shelf.
Rieka, at least, acted politely and poked her head around my side, just under my still shifted right arm, and peered at the shelf.
“Ooh, excellent find, Liam. These will be…” Kassandra’s sentence trailed off as she lifted one coin up to study it.
When the statues hadn’t reacted after a bit, both girls had tucked their spell rods away to have a hand free to inspect the shelves while they held up their light stones with the other. So Kassandra held the coin in her right hand and her light stone in the left, turning it slowly while she inspected it.
Unlike the ingots or the other metals, these coins were entirely untouched by tarnish. The silvery metal was shiny and bright as it glimmered in the reflected light, the rainbow shimmer proving the presence of mana flickering with each turn. After a moment, Kassandra gently set the coin back down with a great deal of care. As her hand came away, I could see that it was shaking slightly.
“Kass?” She didn’t respond to my question, instead fishing in her pouch for something before producing one of her own mana silver, which she set down next to the coin. The one bearing the mark of the Coldeye kingdom was silver in color, but the metal was a duller gray in color.
Rieka gasped in surprise and my right arm went around her shoulders instinctively to steady her. Rieka clung to me, and I could feel her body trembling in excitement.
“Is that?” Rieka asked in wonder.
“Looks like it to me,” Kassandra responded, her voice small as she stared down at the coin. “But I can tell just from touching it.”
“What is it?” I asked, concern welling in my chest.
Rather than answer, Kassandra reached to her left and flipped the little bronze latch on the first box in the row and lifted the lid. Set in ordered ranks, not unlike poker chips in a travel box, were more coins that were silver in color. Four rows that ran from one side of the box to the other and only had a few missing. These were also bearing the same rainbow shimmer, but as Kassandra extracted one and set it on the shelf in front of the box, I could already tell the difference. This coin was a duller silver than the first, just like the mana silver she’d taken from her pouch.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The second box in the row had similar rows of coins to the first, but this time obviously of gold. At a glance, I guessed there were probably a good forty coins in it, not even a single full row full.
Rieka was now trembling full-body against my side, and Kassandra pressed herself backwards against me. This ended up with the small of her back pressing into my junk, but I was too focused on the girl’s mental states to really worry about that at the moment. Instead, I just held them close to me and waited for them to explain. I had a feeling I knew what the coins I’d found were, but I wanted them to confirm it.
“Silver, gold, and…” Rieka’s voice was full of wonder as she indicated the first, second, and then third boxes, “platinum. Mana infused platinum coins from the era of humans.”
The girls just stared at that third box and the dozen or so coins scattered about on the soft blue cloth lining. While the first two had the ordered rows, the third box just had a flat surface to lay the coins out on and they were scattered randomly on that flat surface.
They said it’s generally a ten to one exchange, so each of the platinum is worth ten gold in value, and that’s well over a hundred gold there, plus whatever the others are worth. The thought ran through my head like a scrolling marquee and I turned my attention to the last box in the row, curious of what might be in it.
“Rieka.” The wolf-eared woman’s trembling had calmed as she clung to my side and she looked up at me when I spoke her name. Smiling gently down at her, I gestured to the last box in the row. “What do you think that one has in it?”
“I’m… not sure I want to guess,” Rieka mumbled, but she turned her wide eyes back to it and just stared.
“Open it,” Kassandra’s simple statement made her friend jump, and Rieka turned her head to look down at her friend. I had wrapped my left arm over Kassandra’s shoulder and down over her chest to pull her back against me comfortingly and she was clinging to my arm with it wedged between her breasts at the moment. “I said to open it, Rieka. You let me open the first two, you should do the honors for this one.”
Kassandra’s voice was small, but insistent. Rieka stared at her friend for a moment before nodding. Stepping away from me to reach the box, Rieka twisted the catch with a hand that was trembling again and carefully lifted the lid.
While the interior of the first three boxes were blue velvet, this one had a deep purple color to it. Scattered at equal distances around the interior of the box were seven coins of a bright, silvery-white metal that were coated in singing rainbows of energy.
When Rieka tipped the box open, I felt a nearly physical weight hit me in the chest as the mana radiated from the octagonal coins. They were even recessed in the velvet in little slots describing the shape of an octagon, with one slot sitting empty on the right side.
“Holy palladium…” Rieka’s whisper was deafening in the suddenly silent room.
<><><>
“How can we be sure?” This was the third repetition of Kassandra’s question since the girls had carefully sealed up all four of the cigar-box coin containers and tucked them safely away into Rieka’s bag. The girls hadn’t moved from the shelves since exposing the coins, and neither of them had touched one of the shimmering plates of metal in that last box.
“There’s only one way to be sure. We can have an alchemist test them. But with an emanation like that? There is no question.” Rieka’s words were spoken with such confidence that Kassandra let out a long breath and turned to look at me. Her slitted brown eyes were confused, and she just stared at me for a long moment as if she couldn’t see me.
“Kass?” My concern drew her back, and she turned around to wrap her arms around my waist and crush herself to my front in a hug.
“Thank you, Liam.” The snake girl’s words were muffled from where she was pressing her face into my armored stomach, but I still hugged her back. Rieka joined her in hugging me, her tail stirring madly behind her all of a sudden.
“Yes. Thank you, Liam. The entire reason we are down here is because of your magic, and the only reason the golems at the door granted us entrance was because of that ‘Traveler override’ you spoke about.”
“Don’t mention it, girls. You know I always do my best for you.” I wasn’t really sure how to respond to their thanks. I’d just opened a door and watched their backs while they inspected the room.
“You don’t understand, Liam. This has changed everything. Those palladium coins are fully charged.” Kassandra’s voice was still muffled, but there was a note of wonder detectable in it.
“Well yeah? You told me that any mana metal left down here since the time of the humans would have to have fully recharged. That just makes sense.”
“No, Liam. You don’t get it.” Rieka pulled back slightly to look up at my face with watery eyes and a small smile. “Those coins, the fact that they are fully charged holy palladium? They could cause a war if traded in the open market. The only person with a treasury large enough to secure them is my mother. I could present them to her and she would immediately make me her heir. Kassandra could present them to her and the Silverscale family would be elevated from the rank of viscount to an earl, or she might just grant Kassandra a title in her own right. What I have in my bag, in just that one box, is quite literally a queen’s ransom.”
I blinked.
There really wasn’t any other reaction I could make in the moment when confronted with the fact that those seven little coins were worth far, far more than I had initially calculated in my head. I’d done the math as it being worth seven hundred gold coins, forgetting that the mana-infused coins were worth a lot more than the others. The fact that they referred to palladium as a ‘holy’ metal should have tipped me off.
After almost a minute of gears grinding and the sound of a dial-up modem struggling in my head, I fished out an intelligent response.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” Kassandra had finally pried her face out of my abdomen and she smiled brightly up at me. “After gold, the amount of mana contained in an infused coin begins to increase at a greater rate. Copper to silver to gold is roughly equivalent, but platinum begins the surge and holy palladium is able to hold far more raw mana. People think that is why the presence of mana alloyed holy palladium is so rare.”
My mental calculator started ringing in my head as I tried to figure it out. My ten mana in my personal pool was roughly three mana copper in equivalent exchange. Which meant a mana silver was around thirty-three mana.
And a gold is ten silver, so three-hundred and thirty mana. Even if it proceeds linearly, and Kassandra just said it didn’t, a single mana platinum is three-thousand, three-hundred and thirty, and thus one of those palladium coins is thirty-three thousand, three-hundred and thirty mana. If it’s linear, which I already acknowledged it wasn’t.
All of a sudden I could appreciate the awe that the girls were holding those coins in when I considered what I had been able to do with just a mana silver and my pool.
“We need to get out of here.”
The words fell from my lips on autopilot, and both girls bit their lower lips in sync and exchanged a glance.
“There might be even more to find down here,” Kassandra offered.
“He does have a point though, what we have is far beyond what we expected to find down here,” Rieka said in return.
“Yes, but we will have to tell your mother where we found those coins. The minting isn’t anything that anyone would recognize and she will need to know where they are from. We need to treat this as if we will not get to return to these ruins ourselves. If the crown decides to claim the discovery of the ruins, then that’s it.” Kassandra was firm in her resolve on this.
Rieka worried at her bottom lip again and shared a glance with me. I shook my head to make it obvious I was leaving the decision up to the two of them. I’d voiced my opinion, and it was up to them to decide.
“Let’s… check the rest of the ruins. If there are other treasures, then I want to claim them. What we have will benefit our people a great deal. I cannot imagine that, even split three ways, there won’t be enough here to need to go on missions hunting wild animals for some time. We can relax and just work to train when we want to, without having to worry about the costs.”
Something must have shown on my face, because Rieka immediately looked contrite and hurried to reassure me.
“We would still be summoning you, Liam. It just wouldn’t be for something as banal as having to go collect herbs or the like.” Rieka flushed sharply and looked away, her ears falling back in concern and her tail stilling. “I would still want to spend time with you, and I know Kass would, too.”
“Damn right I would,” interjected my spirited serpentine lover from her cuddling position.
“That’s not what I was thinking about, Rieka.” I was quick to reassure her and the wolf-eared woman perked right back up.
“Oh? What were you thinking about?”
“You mentioned splitting it three ways, but you two—,” I started to say but was cut off by Rieka immediately. The blushing and shy wolf-woman was gone, and in her place was the irritated princess that had ripped into the city-guard previously.
“You have earned a share just as much as the two of us, Liam. I know you don’t believe it is true since we summon you here, but we do! I know that you cannot take it back with you, but a share you will have, nonetheless!”
The vehemence in her tone nearly knocked me over, and I just started nodding in agreement. Rieka had shifted so that she was on her tiptoes and glaring up at me as intensely as possible with her ears pinned back and her right hand in my face with one finger out menacingly.
“I understand, Rieka,” I said gently, hoping to calm her down. An impulsive thought ran through my mind and I acted on it without thinking. “I know better than to argue with a beautiful woman. I won’t fight it.” Rieka blinked three times in rapid succession in surprise. I finished the act of short circuiting her brain by bumping her hand to one side with my cheek and pressing first a kiss to the inside of her wrist, then one to the tip of her nose.
Sputtering, Rieka took a step back and glared at me as her cheeks flushed a brilliant red now. Kassandra’s giggling told me that I’d done something right though as the angry and assertive princess was once again replaced with my shy and blushing wolf-eared friend.
To give Rieka a moment to gather herself, I bent to repeat the motion with Kassandra. The serpentine woman chirped happily and dragged out the kiss far longer than I had planned. Once she was done, Kassandra slithered out of her position between my legs and around towards the door.
“Come on you two, let’s go check out the rest of the complex!
Rieka was still blushing furiously as we emerged from the side room. I tugged the door closed behind me and heard a latch clunk into place after it closed. Pushing on the door told me it was sealed once more. On instinct, I spoke to one side at one of the golems.
“Resume your duty.” The statue’s eyes flicked open and shimmered red before closing once more. Now that I was sure that the security was back in place on the door to the room of precious things, I urged the girls away just in case the statues decided to take exception to their presence.
<><><>
We threaded our way back to the main room where we’d engaged the zombified remnants of the humans and the damaged war-golem. From the large room, there were only two other exits that were not covered with rubble. The one opposite the storeroom and then the door that was set into the partially collapsed second floor. The girls held a quick conversation before agreeing that we should clear the far door on the first floor before moving to the second floor doorway.
Hurrying across the empty space, the sense of wonder at finding the very rare and valuable coins and precious metal ingots faded rapidly as the oppressive blanket that muffled sound wrapped around us again. In reality, that pressure had never left, but the wonder had kept the niggling weight of it off of us while we were in the warehouse.
Moving as carefully as before, I led the girls through the other large door and the narrow hallway that followed after it. This hall was even more disheveled than the other had been. There were stains of ancient blood on the floor and the walls were scarred and melted like the main room had been.
We found and disposed of a dozen more of the mummified humans in the hallway. I acted as soon as I saw the bodies, not giving them the chance to rise and harass me or the girls.
My spike-arm smashed heads and time-worn rib-cages in rapid succession. Once whatever power was animating the corpses vanished, they rapidly eroded into dust again, leaving behind only inorganic items. Kassandra found an iron ring in the dust of one body that she kept to study. But, other than that, the only things they carried were ancient weapons like swords or maces.
The side hallway we went down mirrored the one that led to the warehouse, terminating in a set of double doors that opened into a smaller entryway before the room ballooned out further. But the area with the desk that was similar to a reception or intake area was instead laid out with the shattered remains of stone tables. Metallic bowls and plates were scattered around on the floor, covered in ancient debris and scattered stains. Like the warehouse before, a low wall separated this eating or relaxing area from the rest of the room, which was divided by low walls that held the metallic remains of what looked like barrack bunks.
Another dozen and a half of the undead were scattered around the room and the girls joined in this time. They struck down with spells the ones that clumped up too much or looked like they might have a chance to reach me before I could take them out.
Set in the far right-hand wall were several doors that lead into private rooms, which I guessed were for the higher-ranking folk that used to live or work here. Time had spoiled much of what was here, with the girls only finding things carved of stone or metal. Rieka added several handfuls of regular, precious metal coins to her bag as we went. Once we were sure the room was clear, Kassandra set about recording everything she could in her notebook while Rieka and I went through the metallic footlockers for anything that might have survived the passage of time and was tucked out of sight.
“It’s weird how anything organic seems to have decayed except for the bodies and certain wooden objects, but the stone and metal remains basically untouched,” Rieka muttered as she used the tip of her spell rod to sift through another pile of dust inside one locker.
“You saw the bodies, they were only spared the passage until they were no longer animated. Then they turned to dust as well,” I reminded her, pausing to scan the room again while Kassandra scribbled away using a nearby bed frame to support her notebook. she was safe in the knowledge that the only way in now was the hallway we’d come back through.
“Something befell these people. The dead do not rise on their own, and it is obvious that those raised died violently,” Rieka replied, fishing out several coins and what looked like a metal cloak-pin that she stuffed into her bag before moving on to the next footlocker.
“Oh, that much is obvious from the damage on the walls and the signs of battle. I just wish we knew what this place was. We’ve seen barely three dozen dead, and there are far more beds than that here.” I paused to glance around and do a rough estimate. With how the room was divided and the number of bunk beds, I guessed that there had to be space for almost two-hundred people in this room alone.
“Hard to say. Maybe the animation only took a few, or others escaped. Or they might be deeper into the complex.” Rieka grimaced as she dug into the dusty remains once more and fished out a belt buckle with an elaborate design on it.
I glanced over my shoulder at Kassandra, who appeared to be wrapping up her notes as she was glancing around like she was looking for something, before stepping close to Rieka.
The wolf-eared woman stopped mid-stride and turned to look up at me, a hesitant smile on her delicate lips. Behind her, I could see her tail stirring slowly. I was again thankful for the cheat-code to her emotions that was her tail.
“Hey, I just wanted to thank you for earlier,” I murmured, pulling Rieka into a hug that she happily melted into.
“What do you mean? Not that I will ever complain about being thanked.” Rieka tilted her head so her chin was on my chest and she could look up at me with those shimmering eyes of hers.
“For setting me straight. I have this bad habit of not thinking about myself. It’s something Kass has been trying to break me of doing, and I wanted to tell you that I appreciate you doing it too. I did not, and still don’t, expect an equal share of the loot that you girls acquire. But being treated as an equal, rather than just a useful peon, is gratifying.”
“You are far more than just a useful peon to both of us, Liam,” Rieka purred, her cheeks pinking just a bit while her tail began to stir even faster. I squeezed her tighter, and she squeaked adorably in response before turning to rub her cheek against my chest.
“And you two are important to me as well, Rieka. You both mean the world to me,” I murmured into her soft, platinum-blonde hair, right between her ears. The sensitive triangles flicked, tickling my cheeks slightly with their fuzzy points. We just relaxed for that moment in the dim room, enjoying each other’s arms.
“I hate to interrupt, but are you two ready to go? Or should I give you a minute?” Kassandra’s teasing voice broke into the moment a few minutes later and Rieka stiffened slightly and began to pull back, but I continued to hold her. Turning slightly, I raised an eyebrow at my dwarf lamia, who was smirking up at the two of us with her notebook in her hands.
“If you want to join in the cuddle, you know you don’t have to ask, right?” My statement got a wicked grin from my lover and she slithered forward while sliding her notebook away into her pack.