“This is my room, who are you two?” I asked as I tried to formulate a plan. The two men were dressed like street thugs, and a quick glance over my shoulder revealed that the front door of my room had been kicked in. The crappy locks provided by the motel had done little to stop the thieves.
“Drop your bag, wallet and phone,” the young man with the gun said. I could see a small pile of valuables that the two had already gathered, including several of my burner phones. The pair had been out on the deck getting the crucible and my smelting supplies.
The last thing I could afford at this point was to lose everything I’d brought back with me. I didn’t want to cast a spell and attract unwanted attention, but it looked like there was no chance to resolve this without using magic. I doubted that I could use a summoning figurine before the thug pulled the trigger on the pistol. Summoning was out, but I had another spell that might be useful in this situation. Pulling on my mana, I watched as it bubbled quickly away when I formed the Fail Weapons spell.
Casting the spell, I could feel it connect to the pistol in the man’s hand, and I knew that the firing pin was now jammed and slightly bent, rendering the gun useless. These two had that scrawny, half-starved look of meth heads, so I figured I had a good enough chance against them in a standup fight if their gun was out of the picture and I had the element of surprise on my side.
I dropped my bag and surged forward, shocking the two thieves. The man with the pistol tried to pull the trigger and looked dumbfounded when nothing happened. Focusing on the unarmed thug, I snapped a front ball kick into his bladder, causing him to double over just in time for his face to meet my knee. I could feel his nose crunch under the blow as blood began to flow freely down his face.
The other thug tried to pistol whip me with the gun, but I partially dodged his first strike, taking it on the shoulder rather than the top of my head. A throat punch knocked the man on his butt and left him gasping for air. Reaching down, I pulled the pistol out of the man’s hand, throwing it into the corner of the room.
“Both of you get out of here, there’s nothing in my room or in this entire building that’s worth your lives. If I see you here again, I won’t be so gentle,” I threatened as I pulled the man with the bleeding face to his feet and shoved his scrawny form out the door. The second man raised his hands in surrender and stumbled his way out.
They had thought the room empty, and my sudden appearance and aggression caught them off guard. The pair stumbled down the hallway and presumably off the property. A quick look at my front door revealed it wasn’t going to latch closed anytime soon. For now, I pushed it closed as much as I could while I sorted through the room.
It hit me then, I had just used magic again on Earth. Minerva had warned me that casting spells was akin to firing off a flare for those that were seeking me. Doing so in the past had put both the corporation and the cultists on my tail, but they hadn’t tracked me down immediately. In fact, it was only by combing through the nearby pawn shops that the corporate thugs found me. There was no way I was going to sell anything in my neighborhood, so unless they got extremely lucky and spotted me, there shouldn’t be much chance they could pinpoint my exact location.
I’d have to be more careful in the future, but it was a choice of using my power or being robbed of everything I’d owned, and probably killed or viciously beaten. Reacting to the threat had been almost instinctual. My fighting skills and the rapid response to threats had been burned into me from the various summonings and the war against the lich. I was no longer the same person I was back when the corporate goons found me the last time. If a few corporate goons, or a small group of cultists somehow managed to track me down, they were in for a world of hurt.
Turning my attention back to the immediate problem, I could see that the burglars hadn’t been content with just robbing the place and had knocked over lamps and kicked in the screen of the cheap television that the motel provided. I pulled my currently active phone from the pile, noting it was out of power. A quick search of the mess the thieves left behind allowed me to find the charging cable, which had been kicked under the bed. I plugged the phone in and powered it up.
As it connected to the network, I checked the date. Nearly three weeks had passed since I was summoned to help Fitzfazzle. That meant my rent was almost due and my cash reserves were low. A quick call to the front desk resulted in an argument with the lady that owned the place. She wanted me to pay for the damage, and I wanted a new room without a kicked open door. I wasn’t responsible for people breaking in and she should have had some security in place. For a minute, I thought I was going to get kicked out as I’m ashamed to admit that I lost my temper a bit.
A threat to call the police made the lady, a grizzled old woman named Bao, back off. It triggered my memory of an article I had read about places like this being declared hazards and closed down if too many crimes took place on the premises. My break in couldn’t have been the only thing to have happened here recently, and given Bao’s change of tone, she was on the edge of getting in trouble with the authorities.
In short order, I was placed in a new room on the other side of the motel. The room had the added benefit of the small deck overlooking my old room. I could keep tabs on whether anyone started sniffing around there. The odds of one of my pursuers zeroing in on the exact location was miniscule, but this way, I felt like I had a small advantage if they did.
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After negotiating for an extra week’s free rent, I was happy. This room was as gross as mine had been when I first moved in, but I had already bought plenty of cleaning supplies and worked on sprucing the place up as much as I could while planning my next moves. I needed to move out of this place, but to do that, I needed money.
I was down the last bits of cash and would have rent due in a week or so. To get the ball rolling on moving out, I’d need to sell some of my gold and silver. After cleaning up the place as best I could, I got the crucible ready to go on the deck. I scrounged up a few bricks from a partially fallen fence at the back of the property, so I had something to place the crucible on. My efforts at smelting the metals wouldn’t inadvertently burn down the entire motel, though burning the place down might be the best thing for the neighborhood.
It seemed so strange working on the little crucible here at a motel on Earth, when just a couple weeks ago, I was doing something similar in another world. The lessons the gnomes taught me seemed to stick and after a few hours of effort, I had two gold ingots, nine silver, and a score of copper ingots. Each ingot was supposed to be around two ounces and given the slight fluctuation in some of the coin sizes, my efforts seemed to come out about where I expected.
As I worked, I thought again about what had just happened. Before I became a summoned being, I would have freaked out over two people robbing my place and would have likely given them everything I had to keep from getting hurt. Now, it was almost a trivial effort dealing with the pair I had just fought, and I hadn’t even needed a single summoned creature to do so.
Having faced constant summonings that threw me into the most dangerous situations imaginable, it was hard to be intimidated by a couple of drugged out thugs. No, I had to temper those thoughts, and not get too cocky. When I was summoned, I was rarely in any true danger, and my biggest fear was failing to protect the people I was helping. Here, I had to worry about dying, and couldn’t afford to lose even a single fight.
With my smelting done, I did a quick check of the web to find several jewelry stores within a bus ride distance of where I was. First off, I’d go a lot further north to Fresno and hit a couple shops that I found online. That would be an all-day affair given the distance and the slow nature of having to transfer buses several time. I would like to unload half of what I’d smelted, using the same stores for a few trips before heading somewhere else.
While I sold things off in Fresno, I’d move further south in my search for a new place to live. A quick check of the web revealed several likely places to rent, none of them nice, but most were on par or better than where I was now. I narrowed the search down to two that were close to each other, which meant I could knock out finding a new place in just a single day once I had the money to do so.
Another idea I toyed with was dropping several of the intact coins around LA or mailing them to random people. Maybe that would get the people who were after me chasing their tails. In the end, I nixed that plan, I wouldn’t want someone to inadvertently get hurt because they were confused with a summoned being. No, I’d just sell what I needed and keep off the radar as much as possible. I even toyed with the idea of selling online, but that had just as many pitfalls as anything else and required me opening accounts which I was afraid to do.
My power, both when summoned and here on Earth, had grown considerably from when I started. There was a possibility that in the not-too-distant future, I could deal with the cultists and corporate kidnappers using my magic. If my power ever grew to those levels, it might be worth taking them on to eliminate the threat permanently.
I wasn’t there yet and had a bunch of summoning sessions to deal with before that happened. With everything done, I watched TV for a bit before heading to bed. In the middle of the night, I woke in terror, imagining the strange leech lady was sucking all my blood. After turning on all the lights and checking everywhere in my room, I realized there wasn’t a monster lurking under the bed.
The system suppressed fears and anxiety from the summonings I’d experienced, but Minerva didn’t say anything about it helping out with my experiences in Somhagen. Next time I went there, I would make sure I didn’t stay in the cheapest place in town. Unable to go back to sleep, I got dressed and made my way to the bus stop. I had dropped the ingots into one of the small leather bags that I’d acquired from summoning rewards and stuffed my pockets full of figurines.
At least the little stone figures were only a couple inches tall and didn’t weigh that much. I brought one of the gold ingots and four silver. The copper ones I’d try to sell off on another day to a salvage yard that wasn’t too far from where I lived. I figured there was much less risk there than at a jewelry store or pawn shop.
The trip to Fresno was about as exciting as I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised that everything went off without a hitch. One jewelry store tried to low ball me a bit too much, but the second shop dealt with me fairly. They didn’t dig too deep into questions of where I got the gold and silver and seemed to buy my explanation that my uncle had passed away and left me the ingots as part of my inheritance. My fake ID also worked well enough and for a while I was my alter ego, Raymond Durant.
Back at the motel, I splurged on a meal at a real restaurant nearby. Over the next few days, I kept a close eye out for anyone suspicious as I unloaded the rest of my metals and acquired a nice nest egg of cash. Maybe I could find a nicer place to live than crappy motels if I kept making this kind of money. That also brought up the problem of what my future held here on Earth. I didn’t think I wanted this to be my permanent home, I’d seen too much, and there were other worlds just waiting for me.
I lucked out on a place to stay. An elderly couple in Huntington Beach had an old, detached garage they’d converted into a room. The pair were struggling with the high cost of living in the area and were happy to have a renter that paid in cash a couple months in advance. My new digs were much nicer than the motel, but it wasn’t exactly up to code, so the couple didn’t ask too many questions as long as I returned the favor.
Just six days after getting settled in my new home, and right in the middle of an episode of the live action One Piece, I received a familiar message.
You are Summoned!