City of Opportunities 1 – A Dilapidated Gift of Fate

The office building was located in the Rust-Grass district.

Eldred had not even known of that district’s existence before. On one hand, he could not be blamed for this. Iridescia was a city of ever-expanding sprawl, with districts getting added every year to compensate for both the new births and the multitude of new arrivals that streamed in through the portals. On the other hand, it was not that far away from Ever-Rain. Had he had any interest in exploring his neighbourhood, he would have known it existed years ago.

‘Proves that I have just been wasting away,’ Eldred thought and looked out of the window of the train.

The monorail glided smoothly on top of the crystal pathway that had been grown for it. Magic and technology worked harmoniously, allowing the vehicle to glide over the polished amethyst without a single sound. This train was one of many, constantly cycling routes between the districts. Like so much else, the ride was free for men like Eldred. The extensive charity system worked in his favour there as well.

‘Hopefully, this is the last time.’ That was a new thought. Eldred had not cared about accepting handouts all his life. Now, it rankled his pride, aching in his soul just as the remnants of the beating ached in his flesh.

Eldred embraced that feeling deeply. He had been numb for too long. Every sensation that would drive him to continue onwards he would pile onto the bonfire of his ambition.

The train came to a halt. To Eldred, rising from his seat and marching out the sliding door was a pathway of destiny. Out of Ever-Rain, freed from the eternal caress of droplets, he stepped out into the midday sun. His steps softly echoed on the concrete platform. The air smelled of urine and cheap booze.

Rust-Grass was a rundown slum of a district. Its name once had been in dedication to the large smelting industry, Eldred guessed. That prime had long since passed. The foundries lay still, the smelters disassembled, and the great halls were reduced to concrete blocks. Windows were smashed, the grass around each industrial building littered with shards of glass and flakes of rust.

The homeless were plentiful. They sat in the shade of graffiti-covered structures, consuming bottles of **** without a care. Eldred barely regarded them. They were just one step below where he had been just a few hours ago, damaged to the point that they did not even care to seek out charities for shelter. They numbed their pain with ****, he had numbed his with entertainment.

Not all of Rust-Grass was quite this terrible. There were pockets of people trying to make the best of their situation. Shops that sold food and newspapers, bakeries and tailors, all occurred in clusters. They were little oases of activity, though they too suffered from the general poverty of the neighbourhood. Shutters were dirty, doorframes crooked, and a few windows smashed in by hoodlums that just wanted to do something.

Iridescia was absurdly wealthy, but that wealth only penetrated so deeply.

Eldred felt the eyes of the homeless and the workers alike. His stomach churned. Usually, his slouchy clothes and unimpressive physique left him ignored. Was it because he walked with purpose? Who knew. He kept his jaw clenched and his eyes up ahead. When beggars raised their voices, he ignored them. All that mattered was the future ahead.

Following road signs, he arrived at the administrative building. Every district had one, unless that district was bought out in its entirety by a conglomerate or one of the mega corps. Iridescia’s government was layered and Eldred would have to lie if he said he ever really understood it. He vaguely remembered a teacher once saying that the whole system only functioned because they had access to the wealth of a hundred worlds.

Eldred hadn’t cared much then and he did not care whatsoever now. All he needed out of this building were the details for this inheritance.

Pushing the glass door ahead of him, he entered. The climatized office behind smelled of paperwork and old people. The district was so unimportant, it evidently could be run with six desks on a single floor. Grey carpet, grey suits, white tables, and a few walls that isolated individual work stations.

Eldred’s gaze glided over the room once. He knew exactly why he headed for the one table that he did. The woman behind it looked the least busy and the most attractive.

She was a gremlin. Eldred had seen the species around a couple of times before and they were easily recognised among the other types of demon home in Iridescia courtesy of their diminutive stature. The backrest of her office chair towered behind her like she was seated on a throne.

Despite her lack of height, she was certainly not lacking in other adult features. Beneath a grey suit and between the open buttons of a grey shirt sat a deep, grey cleavage. The gremlin woman had breasts that dominated her small torso and would have looked large on a woman of Eldred’s height. Her hips and thighs were blessed in the same way. Despite the boring pants she wore, the way her plump ass spilled over her seat was automatically enticing.

There definitely had been a realignment in how Eldred perceived the world. Never before had he taken in a woman’s curves with this degree of naked desire. Judging by the way her black tail smacked the edge of her table, she did not appreciate it. Its tip reminded him of a halberd.

“Eyes up here,” the gremlin hissed quietly, as if not to disturb the workplace.

Eldred’s gaze snapped to her face. Her features were a wondrous mixture of adorable and sexy. Full, deep grey lips sat in a round face. Her nose was a cute button, her eyes large, the golden colour of her irises standing out strong against her black scleras.

Strands of black hair framed her face. Bangs crossed between her eyes. Had it not been for the pair of gently curved horns extending upwards from her hairline, perhaps those bangs would have covered her eyes entirely. Her short hair was certainly wild enough. Below the chin, her mane swiftly turned gold. Gold markings could also be found on her horns, her neck and her arms, taking the form of curves and jagged lines.

“There’s as much to admire in those eyes as there is below them,” Eldred said.

He knew as little where he had taken the courage to say that from as he knew how he had managed to say that without stuttering. All the same, the gremlin woman raised one of her adorably short eyebrows. She gave him a once-over.

“You’re wasting my time,” she bluntly said what she thought of that. “My type is tall, rich and handsome. You’re tall-ish and that’s it. Try again after you find some clothes that don’t wear you.”

“Noted,” Eldred responded plainly, absorbing the criticism like a sponge.

The gremlin gave him another confused glance. Seeing someone that was open to turning their life around must have been odd. Eldred knew how rare it was. After all, he was the first person in his own 24 years of living that was willing to try. ‘No, I am not willing to try. I am succeeding,’ Eldred corrected himself, pouring yet more of his will into that fire inside. “I am here because of my inheritance.”

The letter wandered from the pocket of his rain jacket onto the table. He placed it there gingerly. Silently, he waited as the continuously confused woman grabbed it and read its contents. “Oh… well, sucks to be you.”

Dread churned in Eldred’s stomach. Had there been a mistake after all? Was there nowhere to go back to but his coffin of an apartment?

“I knew the system would find some poor sucker to swindle into picking up that ruin eventually, Hope you didn’t expect to get rich by coming here.”

“Am I not inheriting anything?” Eldred asked, his voice flat.

“If you’re smart, you aren’t… I can just show you, not like I got anything better to do.” The gremlin jumped out of her seat and circled around the table. Standing, it was really apparent how tiny she was. Her chin was about the level of his crotch.

‘Her horns would be fantastic handles.’ That thought, thankfully, remained unspoken.

“Wait here, I’ll go grab the keys.” The gremlin quickly marched over to a central safe, punched a combination into the electronic number lock, then fished a set of keys out of the revealed assortment. To make it easier to carry, she put the keys in the envelope he had given her.

Eldred was following her the entire time. Though her grey suit made her as plain as possible, the jiggle inherent to her every motion, be it ass, tits or thighs, was undeniable.

“I am not even going to eye fuck you, dude,” she commented when she was back. “You can stop now.”

“I don’t think I can just turn off the part of the male brain that makes me appreciate gorgeous women,” Eldred responded. “Nor would I if I could.”

“You are seriously weird,” the gremlin groaned, though she did not sound entirely displeased. “At least you’re making this day a bit interesting. Come along.” Her tail tapped his arm in passing.

Eldred followed her out of the building, through a dirty alleyway, and out of the housing core of the district. “Mind if I ask a few questions?”

“As long as it’s not about my sizes.”

‘I don’t have to ask that question anyway, your sizes are short and stacked,’ Eldred thought, while his mouth formulated a more serious question. “What happened to this district? Looks like it was rich at some point.”

“Yeah, like 30 years ago,” the gremlin answered. “There were two big corpos here, the Shorn Company and the New Iron Firm. Shorn Company made deals with the mega corps to get ore out of portals and then sold it to the New Iron Firm to make metals out of it. Whole place used to belong to those two corpos. Then the owner of the Shorn Company suddenly passed away.”

“Adam Shorn?” Eldred asked.

“The same,” the gremlin affirmed. “No one else had enough Cores cultivated to get dominance over the company, so they tore each other apart. Supply chain collapsed, New Iron Firm went bankrupt, all the industry shut down, the whole district went belly-up. Tale as old as Iridescia.”

“It must be difficult watching this prosperous place fall apart.”

“Wouldn’t know, I’ve only been here for a year. The place has hit rock bottom. There’s only morons and beggars here now.”

“What category do you fall in?”

“Oh, we got jokes now!” The gremlin stopped in her tracks and stabbed his stomach with a finger. The gold-tipped digit impacted with a surprising amount of ****. Eldred inhaled sharply, the bruises in that area reacting poorly to the stimulation. “Listen up – I have no fucking clue who you are or who you think you are…” she checked the address on the envelope. “…Eldred Noiris, but you are definitely not the guy to stick his nose in my business.”

Eldred **** himself to stand straight again, no matter the protest of the bruises. “Understood,” he grunted.

She resumed moving. He followed. They walked for a bit in silence. “Off the record, you aren’t actually related to Adam Shorn, are you?”

“Now who is putting their nose into whose business?” Eldred drawled.

“You can just not answer, drama queen.”

Eldred chuckled, then looked around them. Even if he was truthful, he doubted the gremlin would try to bar him from the inheritance. All around them were buildings that were, at best, falling apart. There was no profit to be made of denying him a property here, even if it was his by mistake. “I have never heard the name before. I never really knew my extended family. Whether we are actually related, only an oracle would know.”

“Yeah, that tracks. They’ve been trying to make this someone’s problem forever.”

They arrived by a large property – and that was all the good that could be said about it. Like the industrial area, the grass around the office building was covered in glass shards. The structure itself had not only been forsaken for 30 years, but Cultivators had clearly fought in it before then. A hole on the second floor of the dilapidated building was the largest of the signs, but there were many others.

It was a ruin.

‘So am I.’

“Well, you don’t seem dissuaded yet… but I’ll show you the actual problem,” the gremlin pulled out the small bundle of keys and unlocked the gate in the chain link fence that surrounded the property.

Eldred had been about to make a sarcastic remark that they could have found some rusty hole to climb through instead, only to realize that there were none. In this entire district, the fence was the one thing that was entirely intact.

“Careful where you walk and don’t get too close to the building.” The warning was sincere. Eldred managed to take his eyes off the shortstack’s curves and focused on keeping glass from penetrating his soles. He only looked up again when she pointed him at something. “She’s hanging out on the south side today.”

Eldred followed the trajectory of her finger. He immediately saw what she wanted him to. A glistening mass of black liquid oozed from a windowsill, sealing the shattered window. Droplets of the liquid ran down the once white walls of the structure, making it appear like it was weeping. “What is that?” he asked.

“Ectoplasm – black ectoplasm, specifically,” the gremlin said, then gave him an unimpressed stare. “I can see by your vacant expression that means nothing to you.”

“I passed general education with mediocre grades. I am not what they would call well-informed.”

“Normie, got it,” the gremlin stated dismissively. “Black ectoplasm means there’s a powerful ghost haunting those walls. Occasionally people hear lamenting songs, so we are pretty sure it’s a banshee. Which means…” she took a dramatic pause. “…if you go in there, you’re going to die.”

“Instantly?” Eldred asked.

“As soon as her song makes the fear in your heart multiply.”

“What if I am just not afraid?” he wondered.

“Yeah, good luck not being afraid when there’s a banshee in the building with you, the walls are oozing ectoplasm, and the furniture comes alive,” the gremlin snorted. “You’d have to be that guy and you are not that guy, dude.”

Eldred shrugged. Dismissing her doubt was as easy as taking her criticism. “That is my risk to take. The keys?”

The gremlin woman stared at him, slack-jawed. When she managed to close her mouth, it still took her a few seconds to formulate a response. “I’m not in the habit of assisting suicide… are you really sure about this?”

“I’m not going to walk away from this because it is dangerous. I will either die or thrive. The keys.”

Eldred was no longer asking. The office worker avoided his hard gaze. Was she intimidated or did she not want to meet the eyes of a dead man walking? Either way, she dropped the keys into the envelope again and handed it over. “Die or thrive, huh?” she muttered. “Pretty reckless mindset… but I can’t say I hate it. Good luck.”

“Luck is the last thing I will rely on,” Eldred stated. “I won’t be a beggar. I will make this my home. It’s that simple.”

Awe and disbelief guided the shaking of her head as the gremlin walked away. “At least lock the fence before you go inside. If you croak, I don’t want any stupid kids to have access to the building.”

Eldred considered the request for the moment, then responded with a simple “No.”

“No?”

“I won’t die, therefore, I don’t have to lock the gate.” He shrugged and turned towards the building. “It’s that simple.”

Steadfast in his steps, he approached the entrance.