Amos and Aeric stood in line at the Slayer Office in town after returning the party’s rented equipment. Amos had the assorted minorat cores in his bag, cleaned off and ready to sell at the office. He let his roommate hold the larger one from the shaman while they waited for their turn at the front desk.
Aeric was mesmerized by the smoke floating around inside the crystal. Small motes of light sparked from one internal face of the crystal to another. He shook the crystal and watched the swirling patterns inside of it. It reminded him of a golf-ball sized lava lamp.
Activating his trace sense, he could see a tightly wound ball of astral energy vibrating within the core he held. The astra had the same chaotic qualities that he saw from the enthralled minorats: randomly shooting in one direction or another, but remaining contained within the core itself.
A commotion in the crowd ahead made him look up. The stern woman from before their hunt was addressing the long line in general.
“I’m going to say this once so that I don’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over again: all hunts have been canceled today.”
A chorus of groans and shouts from the would-be-hunters in line answered her.
“If you are here to get approval for a hunt, I would invite you to step out of line. You’ll just be wasting everyone’s time here if you ask me to stamp your forms. The answer will be no.”
The majority of the people in line stepped out, conversations abuzz. With that the wait was considerably shorter. In just a few minutes the roommates were at the front desk.
“You’re the ones who caused all this mess, aren’t you?” The woman at the desk said once she recognized the pair.
Amos scowled. “We didn’t cause anything.” He slapped the green hunt form on the countertop.
“You have no idea how much paperwork I’ve had to fill out because of your little hunting mishap,” she said when she saw the hunt order. “And you’d better not tell me those two girls you took with you perished! I’ll make you fill out all the report forms yourself if they did.”
“They’re both fine. We’re just here to collect the hunt rewards, not argue about how poorly that hunt went.”
She looked over the rim of her glasses and glared down at the two academy students. “And I suppose you think you deserve the full amount, do you? After failing to return on time, requiring the assistance of a professor, and stirring up so much trouble for me?”
“Look, lady, we deserve more than the full amount,” Amos said. “This hunt was supposed to be green: just a basement full of minorats. There’s no way you would have sent us out if you knew it was a nest of enthralled monsters. This was a red hunt at the minimum. You should pay us ten times the amount we agreed to.”
There was a small stir in the line behind them at the mention of the Enthralled.
“You know it doesn’t work that way,” she said, ignoring the noise.
“Then you should equally know not to accuse us of things that aren’t our fault. The rewards, please.”
She huffed, but opened a desk drawer revealing neatly piled stacks of money. Amos pulled out his bag full of monster cores and emptied it out onto the counter. Aeric placed the larger core he had been examining up there as well.
“And we’d like to sell these as well,” Amos said.
The woman paused for a moment, looking at the cores. “These are higher level than they should be,” she said.
“Of course they are,” Amos said. “Did you not hear us tell you the minorats were enthralled?”
She looked over the assortment and did a quick count. “Let’s see: twenty-six uncommon cores and one rare? I believe that’s worth four hundred and thirty notes, plus the fifty-five from the hunt itself gives you a total of four hundred and eighty-five.” She began counting out notes from her money drawer.
“You’d get more from those at Carlton’s Crafts, you know,” a deep voice said from behind them. Amos and Aeric turned to see a large bearded man standing behind them in line. Seeing that he had their attention, he continued his explanation. “The slayer office calculates core prices based on a rolling average market price. But with today’s announcement that hunts are--”
“That’s enough,” the woman interrupted. “I’m afraid you’re violating the privacy policy of our office by interfering with the current customers here. I must insist that you step further back from the counter, sir.”
“Just bring them over to Carlton’s Crafts,” the man said quietly as he stepped back a bit.
“If you say one more word I’ll have you removed from the office,” the woman said, furrowing her eyebrows. She turned back to the cores in front of her. “Now why don’t we just round up to a nice even five hundred notes as a way of compensating for the disruption you just had to go through.” She added a few more notes to the pile from before.
Amos glanced back at the bearded man who just subtly shook his head. “Actually we’ll just take what we’re owed for our contract completion and keep the cores,” he said, sweeping the bag back off the table. Aeric grabbed the larger shaman’s core as well, stirring up another swirl of smoke inside the crystal as he moved it.
The stern woman pursed her lips, but counted out the fifty five notes anyway. “Fine. Next time don’t make so much trouble. If you can’t handle a hunt you shouldn’t be attempting it.”
Amos returned her glare, but did not rise to the bait. He took the money and pocketed it. “Let’s go, Aeric,” he said.
The bearded man gave them a knowing nod as they left.
---
Carlton’s Crafts was a well lit store with broad windows not too far from Eleanor’s Gate in Brightglen. Aeric spent a moment looking through a window at a mannequin standing tall on curved stilts. They made the figure stand taller than a normal human, but he wasn’t sure what their purpose was.
Two other mannequins stood in the display windows next to the tall one. One of them wore a gauntlet with some sort of hydraulic system within it. Embedded in the hydraulic gauntlet was a thick blade above the top of the wrist. The figure was posed as if it was punching the blade towards the mannequin next to it. This one was holding up its arm as if it had a shield strapped to its wrist: but instead all it had was what looked mostly like a thick blue glove that ended partway down the forearm.
A bell above the door chimed as the boys entered the store. The woman behind the counter welcomed them in. Aeric looked around at the displays while Amos walked up to the shopkeeper with their bag of cores. The store was broken out into different sections: toys for children, home decor, small furnishings, and other mundane handcrafted items. There were also more interesting sections filled with what could likely be used as combat equipment. Aeric found himself drawn towards them.
He found the stilts from the first display window. They were on sale for four hundred ninety nine notes. The info sheet next to them said they would let you run faster than humanly possible. He moved on to examine some goggles that had adjustable lenses.
“We were told that you buy monster cores here,” Amos said to the shopkeeper.
“We do,” she said with a smile. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
He carefully poured the cores onto the counter. The woman wasted no time in examining them for quality.
“Were you looking for cash or store credit?” She asked. “We pay you more if you take store credit.”
“How much more are we talking?” Amos asked. He casually leaned against the counter, watching with a frown as Aeric tried on the complicated looking goggles and started twisting some dials on them.
“At today’s price we’ll offer fifteen per uncommon core. With this lot that would get you three hundred ninety notes.”
“That’s the same thing the slayer office was offering,” Amos said with disappointment.
“You can also go for store credit. We’d offer twenty per core, giving you five hundred twenty notes that you could use on anything in our shop.”
“How much would you pay for a rare?” Amos asked. They hadn’t put the shaman’s core on the table yet.
“Forty notes, or fifty-five in store credit,” she said.
“Sheesh. This was a waste of time,” Amos said. “I could have had the money already without making the trip here.”
The bell above the door chimed again as someone entered the shop. The woman looked up and waved. “Welcome back, Carlton,” she said.
Amos turned towards the door and saw the large bearded man from before.
“Lucy,” the man said as he walked up to them. “You haven’t bought his cores yet have you?”
“We were just getting to that,” Lucy said.
“I just heard that all hunts have been canceled while the knights investigate rumors of Enthralled in the area. We should bump up our prices.”
Lucy gave him a suffering smile. “You should have told me this after I finalized this sale, dear,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Nonsense,” Carlton said. “I wouldn’t want any academy students to think we had cheated them out of some hard earned profits, now would I?”
A loud pop came from the side of the store where Aeric was browsing the goods. One of the eye pieces had popped out from the fancy goggles he had on his head. The lens was hanging out of the rest of the unit, attached only by a few metal wires. Amos groaned and pressed a hand against his eyes.
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“Sorry!” Aeric said sheepishly. “I think I tightened it too much.”
Carlton walked over and helped Aeric get the goggles off. He pulled a small leather pouch with assorted tinkering tools out of his pocket and immediately began repairing them. “It’s not a problem,” he said. “Happens all the time when kids treat them like toys. What did you think though? Pretty neat aren’t they? I invented them myself.”
“The zoom effect made me a bit dizzy at first, but they definitely seem useful,” Aeric said.
“Zoom? You mean the magnification function?”
Aeric nodded.
“Yeah, don’t move your head around too fast when you’ve got them wound up or you’ll likely lose your lunch,” Carlton said.
“It looked different than just magnifying though. These aren’t just simple binoculars are they?”
“Try infusing them with astra while you wear them,” Carlton said. He handed the repaired goggles back to Aeric, who put them on.
“Whoa!” Aeric said. “These things have a built in trace sense!”
It’s not as good as what we already have though.
I know, but if he can make something like this what else can he make?
“Isn’t it amazing? Imagine what you could do if you could see non-materialized astra like this,” the inventor said with childlike glee. “Surely you can agree these are well worth quite a bit more than the three hundred notes I’m asking for.”
Aeric nodded, but took the goggles off his head and handed them back. Carlton’s expression fell slightly, until he saw Aeric turn towards the gauntlets.
“Just wait till you see what these can do!”
“We’re not here for toys,” Amos said; his patience finally at an end. “What price are you offering on the cores?”
Carlton looked over his shoulder. “Give him twenty each, Lucy.” He turned back to Aeric. “Put this on and try channeling your astra into it. I can’t wait for you to see what it does.”
Amos ignored the overexcited inventor and turned back to the shopkeeper, Lucy. “Twenty for each of the uncommon cores is fine,” he said.
“You can also take that as twenty-five for store credit if you prefer,” she said. “That’s six hundred fifty notes as credit here.”
Amos pinched the bridge of his nose. “I should have just taken the deal at the slayer office to keep things simple.”
“Hey don’t sell my share of the cores,” Aeric called over. “I might want to get something here.”
“You only get a fourth of them. Even if you’re using store credit that’s around one hundred sixty,” Amos said.
“Let me just take a look around here anyway. This stuff is amazing!”
Carlton had a self-satisfied look on his face while he continued showing things off. Around fifteen minutes later Aeric brought the thick blue gauntlet over to the counter. It looked more like a glove really, though there were gold highlights painted on it in a stylized design. Amos raised an eyebrow.
“This astral amplifier shield is amazing,” Aeric said. “Take a look at what it can do.” He put the gauntlet on his left hand. Channeling some astra into it, he held his arm in front of him as if he was holding a shield and squeezed his fist. A shimmer in the air burst into existence in front of his arm. It was slightly larger than the shield he had rented for their hunt. Wherever he moved his arm the shimmering translucent shield followed.
Amos reached a hand forward and tapped on the shield with his finger. It felt solid. Applying a little more force, he was able to push Aeric’s hand back just by pushing on the air in front of him. He gave a noncommittal grunt and nodded.
“How much for this?” Aeric asked.
“Five hundred notes,” Lucy said.
Amos choked out a cough. “Are you crazy, put that back! We didn’t come here to burn money on some gimmick equipment. It’s probably barely better than a toy. Do you really think they’ll hold up in real combat?”
Lucy’s expression hardened. “Carlton makes only the highest quality equipment,” she said. “If you don’t like what we sell then I suggest you go somewhere else.”
“Fine,” Amos said. He began shuffling the cores back into their bag yet again.
“Now hold on a minute,” Carlton said. “I understand the hesitation. They’re certainly not the same sort of thing you’d find in an armor store, but there’s more to them than meets the eye.”
Amos folded his arms and glared between the shopkeepers and his roommate. “You’re not convincing me that these things are worth as much as real magical armor.”
“I assure you, in this boy’s hands the shield is worth more than whatever you’d find in an armor store. The astra you channel into the gauntlet changes what type of shield you get. Different classes will have different results.”
Amos watched the shimmer continue to glow in front of his roommate. He knew about how every class had its own slight variation on internal astra, but he didn’t know much about it other than that.
“Classes focused more on defense get a better result with my shields than they would holding some enchanted piece of metal. It’s always a joy seeing what different classes can do with these. There’s one class in particular though that I never even considered when I was making these. That happens to be the class your friend here has.”
“Nullifier,” Amos said. “So what sort of effect does his oh-so-special astra have on the shield then?”
“That’s just what I’d like to find out,” Carlton said. “I’ll tell you what: I’m willing to part with the astral amplifier shield for say, three hundred notes and a detailed review of how it works out for you. That’s a whopping two hundred notes off the price you know.”
“Forget it,” Amos said. “That’s more than twice the amount he’ll be getting from the cores.”
“What about the shaman’s core? I still have that in my pocket. How much could we get from that?”
“Honestly at this point I’d rather hold onto it and see if prices jump even higher. Even if we sold it though, you’d only get a quarter of what it’s worth. Listen, just save up your money and come back later.” He turned back to Lucy. “We’ll just take the notes.”
“Wait,” Aeric said. “Let me use Elsie’s portion as well. With hers and mine combined I can make the three hundred work.”
That’s okay, right?
Sure. I’m curious to see how well the shield works too, you know.
“Are you sure she’ll be okay with that?” Amos said.
“Absolutely,” Aeric said.
“If she gets mad it’s all on you, you understand?”
“I take full responsibility for any anger she’ll have about this.”
“On your head be it,” Amos said, then turned back to the shopkeeper. “However many cores needed as store credit towards the shield and the rest as cash please.”
Carlton rubbed his hands together and grinned while Lucy counted out the notes. “I have so many other inventions I’d like to see you try out with your Nullifier astra,” he said. “Be sure to come back once you’ve used the shield in combat and let me know how it goes.”
“Will do,” Aeric said. He flexed hand and relaxed it a few more times, gazing with fondness at his new shield.
---
Amos and Aeric were on their way back to the keep from Carlton’s Crafts. Aeric kept forming the shield and dissipating it, while Amos pointedly ignored his roommate’s childlike behavior.
They had just passed the entrance of the astral bathhouse when they crossed paths with Lyric. From the way the emerald haired girl was dressed it was clear that she was about to be taking a dip in the astra rejuvenation water.
“Oh hi, Aeric! Fancy running into you here,” Lyric said. She stepped into his path, forcing him to stop. He caught the scent of her flowery perfume.
Elsie? She wasn’t wearing lipstick before she sent you off to the library was she?
She must have put it on after I left. And changed into that swimsuit as well. It’s kinda cute though. Maybe I should try one like that too.
You wouldn’t fit.
I meant that style made in my size, doofus.
“Lyric,” Amos said simply. Aeric gave a small smile and waved.
“This is perfect timing!” Lyric said. “I was hoping someone could help put sun lotion on my back before I get in the water.” She placed her bag on the ground between them, then leaned forward and pulled out a small circular container out of it. She stood back up and unscrewed the lid with a flourish and a smile, showing a white cream inside the container.
“No. We’re in a hurry,” Amos said.
“I could--” Aeric started to say, but Amos interrupted him.
“She’s obviously up to something,” Amos said. “This is exactly what she does. All the time. Just uses her divination visions to be in just the right place at the right time like this. You can’t trust anything to be a coincidence around diviners.”
“Now that’s just rude,” Lyric said, glaring at him. “Why are you being so discourteous to a lady just on her way to the bathhouse? You’re completely tactless!”
“Well first off, lady, sun lotion hasn’t been invented in this world yet. Not to mention that it would all wash off in the shower you have to take before you can step foot in the hot springs anyway. And that’s on top of the fact that the baths have a roof so you don’t even need to worry about getting a sunburn anyway. How did someone who can see the future not see all these problems with what you just asked Aeric to do?”
Lyric blushed, though Aeric wasn’t sure if it was anger or embarrassment. “I’ll have you know sun lotion has been invented. I made it myself.” She held the jar of cream forward as if that somehow proved her claim. I actually have quite a few people who buy it from me, I’ll have you know.”
Amos reached out and yanked the jar of lotion out of Lyric’s hands. She scrambled to stop him from reading the label, but he easily overpowered her with a single hand against her shoulder.
“Madame Mimi’s Connection Cream? Really, Lyric? Why would you even need something like this, let alone ask my roommate to rub it onto your skin? You do know what this kind of lotion is used for, right?”
“It’s sun lotion! I just re-used the jar!” Lyric was now beet red and scrambled harder than ever to get the jar back from the tall blond boy. “This isn’t the way this is supposed to go!”
Amos rolled his eyes. “Still trying to convince Aeric that he’s your one true boyfriend, are you?” He turned towards his roommate. “You probably didn’t even know this, but she used to go around saying that you two were going to be a couple. I guess she thought you’d fall in love with her for some reason.”
“Stop, Amos!” Lyric said. She tried to kick him, but as she was only wearing loose sandals it did more harm to her toes than his shin.
Amos ignored the kick. “Honestly though I think she’s just trying to distract you to sabotage the competition. Don’t give in, Aeric. She’ll use her feminine wiles on you to make sure her roommate wins. It’s not about love at all: just some underhanded trick to gain an advantage here.”
Lyric had tears at the edges of her eyes at this point. She took a step back then made one more leap towards the jar of cream. Amos brought his arm up as she jumped and touched the very tip of one finger into the cream as it passed out of her reach. In the commotion she tripped over him as he stepped back from her. Her momentum carried her awkwardly towards Aeric, who instinctively activated his shield.
Aeric found himself on his back with Lyric lying mostly on top of him. Her torso and arms were pressed against the shimmering shield in the air as if she was laying on a sheet of glass between them. A teardrop fell from her eye onto Aeric’s cheek.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, and reached down around the shimmering shield to brush her teardrop off of his face. She happened to use the hand that had a tiny bit of the cream on one fingertip. Aeric felt a warm tingling sensation as the lotion absorbed into his skin.
He blinked and dropped the shield in surprise. It phased out of existence, and the pale green haired girl fell the remaining few inches on top of him.
“Sorry!” Aeric said into her hair where she had landed on his chest. He moved his arm out from underneath her and tried to help her sit up. She clung to him for a moment, then finally raised her head “Are you okay?” He asked.
She pushed herself up off of him and stood up. Her bare knees were scraped from where she had fallen against the ground, as her swimsuit hadn’t covered much of her legs. “I’m fine,” she said, then grabbed her bag and turned to glare at Amos, holding a hand out for the jar.
“We’ve wasted enough time talking to you anyway,” he said. “We need to get to the library.” He handed the jar back to her. She snatched it from his hands and screwed the lid back onto it, then turned and marched towards the entrance of the bathhouse.
Aeric watched her go, holding a hand up to his cheek that was still tingling ever so slightly. He found his thoughts strangely fixated on considering what possible futures may lay in store for him and the girl with emerald hair.