Fluff

Chapter Fourteen - An Adorable Misunderstanding

Teddy didn’t know what the weird guy did to anger the Boss. All she knew was that he was smaller than her, and not nearly as strong, and that those two things made it real easy for her to pin the guy against the wall and keep him there for the Boss.

“I... have questions,” the Boss said. Her voice sounded shaky, like she was holding back a whole lot of anger.

Alea Iacta--which was a weird name, but that’s what it said above him--looked kind of pale. That was probably the right response. Teddy would feel kind of pale too if the Boss was angry at her.

“A-ask away,” Alea Iacta said with false cheerfulness in his voice. “I live to serve, lady Boss.”

The Boss frowned at him. “Why were you running from those heroes?” she asked.

“I swear, I was just minding my own business, walking across the street, not bothering anyone. And then they decided to start screaming at me. That Glamazon girl? The one in the awful costume? She started throwing fireworks at me! So I hightailed it out of there. I didn’t mean to run into you I swear.”

The Boss frowned harder and Teddy caught her cue. She took a deep breath in, then let it out as a low rumble deep in her chest. She even opened her mouth a little to show Alea Iacta her big bear teeth.

“You... you were just walking along?” the Boss asked. She sounded shrill, on the edge of either panic or of screaming. Teddy figured that Alea Iacta was about to make the Boss real angry now. Lying was against the rules. “Walking in costume?”

“W-well, maybe I was playing around with my powers a little? You know, I had a quest or two? Just little things. Completely harmless. I didn’t rob anyone that doesn’t have insurance to cover it.”

Teddy flexed her claws. They kind of hurt when they dug into the bricks of the wall behind Alea Iacta, but it was worth it to see the man flinching back.

“I might have used my power on people too!” he squeaked.

The Boss’s eyes narrowed. “Your power? How does it work?”

The man waved his arms about. “You know how everyone is just a little lucky?’

The Boss didn’t seem impressed by his rhetorical question.

“Ah, well... I can take a bit of that luck and tuck it away for a rainy day, as it were. A pinch here or there from people on the street, you know?”

“And you used that to decide which alley to hide in?” she asked. Teddy hadn’t thought of that. The Boss was really clever.

He nodded. “That’s the gist of it, yeah. I used up a chunk of my luck to find a place to hide from the heroes, and then I met you... how lucky.”

The Boss seemed to deflate a little. “That sounds more truthful, at least,” she said. “Can people sense you using your power on them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It feels like, uh, passing gas, but from everywhere? Giving people luck feels like the opposite, or so I was told.”

The Boss’s face went red with anger. Teddy didn’t know what the guy said that angered her so much, but she growled anyway.

“Hey, hey, no need to worry, I’m an honest kind of guy. I’d never use my powers on friends,” he said with a smile that even Teddy knew was fake as fake could be. “I just want to head on back home, maybe move over to the next city over? I wouldn’t want to mess with your turf.”

“My turf?” the Boss asked.

The man swallowed. “Your territory. Your city.”

“You don’t need to move away,” the Boss said. “I don’t have any... turf. I just... I just want to do my own thing.”

“Right, right, of course,” he said. “I’m very, very sorry about bumping into you. Here,” he said while reaching into his jacket. He pulled out a big wad of cash, all sorts of paper bills squished together in a heap. “I’ll give you half my winnings for the day. That ought to make us even right?”

“Half?” the Boss asked.

Teddy knew what that meant. She swiped a paw down and tore the entire heap of cash out of the man’s hands and pinned it to the ground.

Quest Complete!
Mug a Stranger!
Reward: +1 Skill Upgrade Points Per Person Successfully Robbed!

Awesome! The Boss must have known that Teddy’s mugging quest was still active.

“Right, right, that’s fair, sure,” Alea Iacta said. “Take it all. It’s what I deserve, right Boss?”

“Boss?” The Boss asked. “Oh, right, the name. Sure, you can call me Boss if you want.”

Understanding took a moment to appear in the man’s eyes, but when it did, Teddy backed away a bit. The Boss had claimed him as one of her own now. He was newerer than Teddy though, so he didn’t have seniority or anything like that. Also, he was small and squishy compared to her.

Alea Iacta nodded, stood a bit straighter, and brushed off his costume front. “Right. Cool. So, ah. What do you want me to do, Boss?”

“Do?” Boss asked. She shook her head. “I don’t suppose I could tell you to hand yourself over to the authorities. That would be hypocritical.” She paused for a moment, then sighed. “Just go. And please, if you can help it, don’t kill or hurt anyone. I don’t want the heroes coming around and asking a bunch of questions.”

“I can be subtle,” he said before adjusting his huge feathery hat.

Emily stepped back to, and gestured towards the mouth of the alley. A moment later the words above her head flickered away, and she was back to being a normal girl who was also secretly the Boss.

“Wonderful, stupendous,” he said. “If you don’t mind me asking Boss, what scheme were you running here?”

“Sc-scheme? “Emily asked. “None? I was working at the soup kitchen.”

The man’s eyes widened. “You were poisoning the food or something?”

“What?! No! I was doing the dishes.”

He nodded. “Poisoning the utensils. Make it harder to figure out who did it.”

“Just, just go, please,” Emily asked.

Alea Iacta snapped a salute and took off jogging towards the end of the alleyway. In a moment, he was off and heading out of sight.

Teddy figured her time as a bear was up, so she untransformed and returned to being just Teddy the girl. “That was well done, Boss,” Teddy said. It felt a bit weird to go from taller than the Boss to a bunch shorter.

“Thanks Teddy,” the Boss said. She knelt over and picked the bucket she’d used for the dirty water up. “We should get back to work, I guess.”

“Cool. Are we gonna pick some food up after? Maybe we can eat here?”

The Boss nodded. “I’ll ask if they can set aside a pair of plates for us,” she said. “They won’t be impressed if we take any longer though.”

Teddy nodded along. This little diversion had been fun, but her work drying utensils and plates for her comrades inside was just as important. She was glad that the Boss was conscious of the needs of the proletariat. Her book said that that was very important.

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “Let’s get back to work. We can continue plotting after we’ve had lunch.”

***