NOVEL WEB 27: Progress
“Wait, joking aside… quickly, let’s just agree not to talk about this for now, okay?” I asked, motioning between Bassi and I. “Bassi clearly has problems with it being public knowledge that we’re… you know, fucking… so yeah.”
“Oh, uh… yeah that’s fine,” Singer nodded. “I didn’t intend to talk about it regardless.”
Bassi gave me a long look that softened slowly as it went on. “Thank you, that is kind of you… but we really should get on to the topic of that enchantment energy.”
“Oh, is that what you’re here about?” I asked excitedly, perking up and turning to Singer.
“Yeah. You came back with… well if I wasn’t so good at my job, it would have been a bomb,” she said, gingerly taking the thing out and placing it on the table.
I blanched. “Uh… why?”
“I didn’t expect you to murder literally hundreds of gurg,” she explained dryly. “Now that thing is so full that it will detonate if I try and use the energy for a few objects. It has to all come out at once, or this whole house is going to be raining down on the plains for weeks.”
“Okay… that’s probably something you should have mentioned could happen before I went out there,” I said slowly, staring at the little lantern thing in fear now. Was it okay to back away? Would they look at me funny if I scooched my chair back just a little?
“Well, in all fairness, I had no idea you were capable of that much killing,” she huffed, giving me a friendly glare. “Seriously though, we need to figure out what to do with this thing. Either we pick something to blow up, or we make something really big.”
“How big are we talking?” I asked, suddenly excited. There was so much potential here. I wonder how versatile enchanting actually was?
“If I were to make a weapon, it would be worth fifty peaks,” she said, then frowned, “Although I’d be lying if I said I could actually sell it for that, given than anyone wanting to actually use the sword wouldn’t have that kind of money.”
Fifty peaks was a lot of money. The largest denomination of gold coin, we’d have had about that much in each of the bags we’d carried out of that heist.
“Okay, so we make Bassi a fancy sword,” I mused, then my eyes lit up. “Or some kind of crazy automatic protection for the door!”
The two women before me shared a look for a moment, then turned back to me with equally exasperated expressions. “Why don’t we make you a fancy sword?” Bassi asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Oh,” I said slowly. “Right… okay. But how would we make a sword that would be useful to me? I can already summon crazy void spike things,” I told them, summoning one for emphasis.
“When did that happen?” Bassi asked in surprise.
“That’s not all!” I grinned, promptly disappearing into the dark other place. Getting up out of the chair, I carefully positioned myself behind Bassi, then pulled myself out. “See?” I whispered into her ear, thoroughly enjoying the way she jumped in alarm.
“I knew you’d appear behind me and you still got me!” she complained, although when I wandered back over to my seat, I found her grinning with evil delight. “No wonder you were able to cut down so many gurg. I couldn’t even find you with the wind! I tried!”
“Yeah I sorta go to another place, a strange copy of this reality,” I nodded with equal excitement. “Then, I can walk around and appear wherever I pop back out.”
“I wish I could have seen their faces!” she laughed, green eyes burning with glee. “The terror! Oh, we definitely need to go back down there together, and soon.”
“Okay, clearly you don’t need help there, but what about enchanting your outfit?” Singer interjected before Bassi and I could get too caught up in our excited murder-talk.
“Yes, make her cloak strong, able to stop a blade,” Bassi said quickly, and when I tried to argue, she lunged forward and covered my mouth with both hands. “No arguing. I want you protected.”
I frowned at her, but otherwise didn’t complain. Bassi was the bossi, after all.
“I think I can do that,” Singer murmured thoughtfully, giving us both a wry, amused look.
“Fine,” I grumbled around Bassi’s hands. Great, now I was thinking about her fingers and that always made me horny.
“Well then, meeting concluded, I guess,” Singer said, standing up a little too quickly. “I will leave the both of you to… well, each other. Mist, I’m stealing your cloak for a day.”
“Oh, alright.”
****
After my cloak was done, Singer and I decided that we needed to do everyone else’s too. It was only fair after all. So I spent my week down in the ruins, butchering hundreds of monsters and hoovering up their magical essence into my little keychain bomb.
Well, every second day. Singer needed a day with the keychain doofer so that she could enchant the cloaks.
I spent those days doing mundane heists, sneaking into manors up the hill and taking a few things here and there. I didn’t really care about the money, but when I gave the money to someone around the city who really needed it, the expressions of relief I got made it worth every scrape and bruise I got as I snuck around and climbed walls. People down here in the slate plains were hurting, and it pulled at my heartstrings with an intensity similar to how Bassi did.
Which was proving to be a problem. It honestly wasn’t surprising that my feelings for her had snuck up on me. I’d never fallen for anyone before, after all. Sadly, every time I had her fingers on me, or inside me, it felt strange. I wanted her to feel what I was feeling, I didn’t want to simply have sex anymore, I wanted to make love. I wanted to cradle her and whisper loving words as she came, shaking in my arms. I wanted her to do the same for me.
I’d have to content myself with what we had though, which was still so nice. She was everything, the best part of every day, and also how I ended every day. We were sleeping in the same bed every night now, regardless of if we got frisky. Both of us were seemingly pretty fragile in the dark of night, and having the other there for comfort was pretty much required.
It was during one of those nights that she asked me something. Laying there in the dark and waiting to sleep, she murmured, “Would you be alright speaking to Jitters about your old world? About the… mechanical things that you mentioned? Jitters loves understanding how things work, and she could use a pet project right now.”
“Yeah, I could do that,” I agreed, wishing I could see her in the dark. “I was only really worried about you, as far as telling people goes. Everyone else would fall into line.”
“They are all good people, each one would accept you,” she said soothingly, her hand finding mine under the covers. “You’re one of us.”
“I know,” I sighed, squeezing her hand. “Just needed to convince my brain that it was true.”
****
I found Jitters the next day and dragged her into her workshop. Now that I looked around at it properly, I probably should have come to her sooner. She very obviously tinkered with more than just locks. I could see all sorts of rudimentary designs for common mechanisms I’d taken for granted back on earth.
“What was it that you wanted to talk about?” she asked, sitting down in her chair.
Perching on the edge of a bench, I gave her a long look. “So, I’m guessing you’ve noticed that I’m a little different from the average person of Anamoor…”
What followed was several hours of recounting the same shit I’d told Bassi, although I left out a few details, like what I used to look like. As expected, she was more interested in earth than anything about the goddess.
“Wait, hold on…” she exclaimed, raising a hand to stall me. “You’re sayin’ that you all rode around in machines powered by explosions?”
“I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous,” I laughed, enjoying the expression on her face. “If you have paper and charcoal I can show you. I was a big ol’ nerd back there so I know a lot of stuff that was useless at the time.”
“Not so useless anymore,” she grinned, turning to rummage on a shelf for the paper I needed. “Aha, here’s some paper.”
She passed me everything and I got to work with sketching out how a basic combustion engine worked. Thank the goddess for late night wikipedia binges, that’s all I had to say on the matter.
It wasn’t long before the paper was snatched out from under me and she was staring down at it. “But how does it actually push it forward?”
That led to another long explanation that I was significantly less equipped to handle, but she picked up what I was trying to say very quickly. Then she was muttering to herself and drawing all over what I’d put down on the paper, asking questions where needed.
It was as I sat there watching her figure all this shit out in real time, that I realised I had created a monster. Jitters was almost terrifyingly intelligent, and now that she knew this shit was all possible, she was off like a wind up toy car. I just hoped I didn’t lose her under the couch or something.
Several hours later, Singer knocked on the door, poking her head inside to find the pair of us surrounded by paper and covered in charcoal smudges.
“Mist, Bassi was looking for you and— Wow, what happened in here?” she asked, staring about in bewildered awe.
“Progress!” Jitters shouted excitedly. “Singer, I’m going to need you to make a lot more of those monster goo collecting thingies. Make a whole damned belt of them for Mist.”
Singer gazed blankly into Jitters’ excited, vibrating eyes. “I… okay, but why?”
“P-r-o-g-r-e-s-s. Progress,” Jitters whispered, spelling the word out before repeating it again, waving a piece of charcoal around like a madwoman.
