City of Opportunities 5 – Low Bar for Entry

“What is this device? Is it a server?” Nyx inquired.

Eldred was almost too enticed by her ever-melodic trill to actually hear the questions. Opening the laptop, the skinny man answered, “It’s something that runs programs, which are… virtual machines inside the machine that operate certain tasks.” He had never thought about how odd technology, computers in particular, were. “This is a laptop, a form of computer that, well, fits on top of your lap.”

“I see?” His banshee did not sound like she understood at all.

“Better to just experience it,” he said and pressed the power button.

The screen remained black.

Eldred sighed.

“Was something supposed to happen?”

“It was supposed to turn on... the screen was supposed to light up, sort of like a lumen.” Eldred gestured at the crystals overhead, then closed the laptop and turned it around in his hands.

Nyx watched it all, chin resting on his shoulder. That just felt like the natural place for her to put her head. “Can you fix it?”

“If it’s actually broken? Absolutely not,” Eldred answered. “My expertise is limited to cleaning my own tower… that’s another kind of computer.”

“If you possess your own, are we in need of this one?”

“Yes,” Eldred answered immediately. The computer in his home was far out of reach, locked behind a door that he was not willing to step through again. There was no place in the world that he would rather avoid than that lifeless apartment. “Plus, there might be answers on this one… or contacts.”

30-year-old contacts, if there were any, but contacts all the same. Though most people in Iridescia had around a human lifespan, 100 years, with the wonders of medicine available to all of them, there were many species that lived for much longer. Nyx herself, as a representative of the undead, was one such example. Ignoring biology (or lack thereof), cultivation and magical power in general could extend the lives of anyone with ambition and money.

30 years did not have to mean much.

Eldred finished his inspection with a simple shrug. There was nothing immediately wrong with it. “Did you put it there? Were there others like it?” he asked.

“I did and there are. They looked broken. I stacked them over here.”

Nyx guided him to what Eldred assumed to be the office of the former overseer of the general work area. A big internal window would let the man seated in it take a look out into the derelict office space. Opposite that window, two large paces removed from the door, were the remnants of a workstation and more trash.

The pile did contain a couple more laptops and other broken computers. Nyx had gathered them up by aesthetic, not knowing the purpose of the hardware. Rummaging through, Eldred tried to turn on the other laptops. When that failed, he looked for something else – and he found it.

“Let’s see if that solves our problem!”

Nyx inspected the black cord that he held aloft. Her mouth opened in the beginning of another question. She elected to wait and see.

They returned to the first laptop. Eldred would have loved to sit down at a table, but they were all health hazards – plus, the chairs had universally collapsed over time. The floor, dusty as it was, would have to do. He plopped down by a wall socket and pushed the two-pronged end of the cord into it. The metal protrusion on the other side was then pushed into the side of the laptop.

“The cable allows delivery from the energy grid to the battery of the laptop,” Eldred explained. “If we’re lucky, then it is just out of power – a fire without fuel.”

“A waterwheel without a river,” Nyx echoed, to underline that she understood.

Eldred first heard the laptop working. Old fans activated, blowing loose dust out of the sides of the machine. The screen activated, the change of the liquid crystals from inactive to active black was subtle and yet clear. Having been closed all this time, the screen only bore the smudges of its previous owner. They became clear to see when the screen suddenly switched to white.

Finally, the logo of the operating system popped up. It was black and grey on the empty background. A sign made of cables and circuitry was being held in the claws of an eight-legged serpent. “Imperialis,” Nyx read the word and tilted her head. “What does it mean?”

“It’s the name of the company that made the base framework in which this machine simulates other machines,” Eldred tried his best to explain. “They’re one of the Great Ones.” He immediately realized that she wouldn’t know what that was either. “Iridescia, this world, is governed and owned by a multitude of corporations. We call the biggest ones the Great Ones.”

“How many are there?” Nyx wondered.

“No clue,” Eldred responded. “Iridescia is constantly expanding, companies rise, fall, split and absorb each other in turf wars and marriages. Never bothered to try and understand all of that weave. This will change soon though, since we’ll enter that world now.”

“We are?”

The question had Eldred smile, then shake his head. “Right… we talked about our uninteresting past but not what comes next,” he realized aloud. He put the laptop down, leaving it to calculate its first booting sequence in 30 years. If his PC at home had needed this long, he would have had a tantrum. For a laptop of this age, he was happy that it started at all. It spoke to the sturdiness of the hardware that it had retained its capacity despite the turning of time.

Once he had put the device on the ground, he tapped his now empty lap twice. Nyx understood his meaning and hovered around him, placing her shapely derriere on his thigh. His slung arm and shoulder became her backrest. A little bit of wiggling later, she was comfortable, throning on his lap like a proud queen. Though her head was elevated above his, there was only forlorn humility and curiosity in her gaze. Her black lips parted in a light sigh when he did as he wanted to and placed a hand on her left breast.

That was just where his palm was supposed to rest.

“I will never again be content with just surviving,” he told her. “That’s the realisation I had yesterday. I will thrive or die. To thrive, I need money. To get money, I need work. Work that pays well, very well.” He made a gesture at the laptop. “Quickest way to get paid well is to make contact with a corporation that has access to a portal.”

“Access to a portal…?” This time, Nyx’s question was slow and hesitant. She blinked, icy blue eyes turning into the distance. “Half-remembered information cracks through the surface of my frozen mind…” she mutters. “…portals… a natural phenomenon on Iridescia. Gates to other worlds… this city lives off extracting resources from those worlds?”

“The city grows from this,” Eldred offered a light correction. “I don’t think the city needs anything besides Stardust to continue functioning.”

Nyx hummed, distracted by her echo of the past. A disappointed sigh made it clear that she couldn’t hold onto it. Anything besides simple information was returned to oblivion. “Functioning is not enough for you. You want power and status.”

“I want to live,” Eldred clarified. “Power and status are my chosen goals, but what matters above all is that I do something. I won’t just… exist again. I can’t.”

His banshee put her arms around his neck, smiling as she pressed her warm body against him. “I will gladly join you in your ambition,” she whispered, while lowering her lips to his. Another kiss, the latest of so many and the beginning of a multitude of them.

Eldred’s heart beat in his chest, hard and strong. He had never felt as alive as he did making out with this ghost lady. Between the taxation of maintaining her corporeal form and the tingles brought by every victory in the wrestling of their tongues, he felt exactly what he had been missing. He was needed. He was wanted. The expectations she had for him and he had for himself consumed the emptiness of his soul. Every kiss further grew his certainty that this was the path forwards.

“I will grow stronger,” he vowed once more, words whispered into the break between kisses.

“You will,” his banshee agreed.

The series of kisses did what he thought impossible. Despite the drain on his vitality, his manhood responded to the stimulation. Eldred felt quite lightheaded, like he had too little blood in his body to serve that rise. All the same, his pants were once more straining.

His tongue was too busy to present the question, so he grabbed Nyx’s hand and guided it to the bulge instead. Though he was happy that her first instinct was to grab his cock, she did so too firmly. The immediate attempt to stroke him while he was enveloped by cloth did not help. Their kiss broke.

“Not that tight, not while I am dressed,” he told her.

“Oh, is it unpleasant?” Nyx frowned at his nod, her eyes downcast in guilt. “I will learn.”

The way she muttered those three words had Eldred’s spine tingle with delight. ‘Am I a dom?’ he asked himself. He had never really explored the question, largely for a lack of women in his life to do so. Now, armed with his verbose confidence, he seized the opportunity. “And you will start now. Suck me off.”

Nyx’s sapphire gaze snapped up to his brown eyes. Pale white cheeks flushed. A wanton sigh flowed from her black lips. “Yes, Eldred.”

She climbed out of his lap, assuming the same top-down, bottom-up pose she had on the bed the previous day. A repetition of the previous experience was exactly what they both wanted. Nyx made very certain she tugged on his waistband in such a way that his cock smacked down her face again. She moaned aloud when it happened.

Eldred simply went with the flow. His fingers entangled themselves in her white mane, guiding her tongue up and then her enveloping lips down his shaft. Knowing what he did now, he had no qualms about stuffing his cock down her throat. Keeping her pinned against his groin for however long he wanted was a privilege brought by her nature.

A memory of her life, perhaps, had her squirm in asphyxiation after a while. He loosened his grip to let her come back up for air. She refused. Being kept down seemed to be exactly where she wanted to be.

Leveraging his grip, he made Nyx bob her head. He had ordered her to suck him off. The reality that manifested was more akin to using her as a cocksleeve. Just thinking about that put Eldred at the edge of release. His eyes were glued to Nyx’s attractive face. Every time he pinned her against the base of his manhood, more of the lewd, frothing mixture of saliva and precum stained the area around her lips.

He was loving this – and so was she. His banshee was built to be a comfort hole, it seemed like, with every renewed penetration of her throat causing muffled screams to vibrate the walls of the tight hole.

Eldred just barely held on until Nyx visibly seized up. Her orgasm made her eyes roll up. Her ass rose up a bit as her legs moved in senseless, rhythmless spasms. At the same time, he came down her throat.

It was no such titanic release as the day before, no supernaturally large load, but it was still the second most satisfying orgasm Eldred had ever had. Every electric tingle that ravished his nervous system ended with another spurt of semen down the gullet of the gorgeous woman so eagerly pressing her tongue against his manhood.

“Good girl,” he groaned, while guiding her up his length. With a loud pop, he came free. “Thank you very much, I feel… so much lighter.” He did not know how else to describe what he felt in the aftermath of the orgasm.

“The pleasure was mine,” Nyx assured. “Thank you for using me.”

‘She is definitely a sub,’ Eldred noted mentally, ‘and I love that.’ He rolled his shoulders. Drinking his essence had not magically lifted the icy touch on his spine. Though her behaviour could have fooled him, she was a banshee, not a succubus… or maybe she was a banshee born from a succubus soul?

The grumbling of his stomach pulled him to more urgent needs. In the post-nut clarity, he was hit by a multitude of reminders of his mortality. His mouth was dry, he had not drunk any water since he had gotten off the train. The last meal he had had been some bakeware at the station before getting on the train. Also, sex was great, but it did leave him a bit sticky.

“Let’s move to the kitchen,” he said.

He had no illusions about finding actual food in the kitchen, but the converter that turned the Pulsar’s energy into clean water still worked. They rinsed themselves off with their hands in the middle of the ruined office cooking place, right beneath the hole that led up into Nyx’s former room. After drinking a few handfuls of water, Eldred felt a little better.

When they returned, the laptop had finished booting up.

“Good timing,” he said and plopped back down on the floor. Back against the wall, Nyx leaning on his shoulder, he checked out what the laptop had to offer.

The first and most important revelation was that it had access to a Private Netsphere. “What does that mean?” Nyx asked.

“Data is constantly flowing all around us through invisible frequencies,” Eldred responded. “We call that the internet. Basically, machines like this talk to each other with it. Consider it a near-instantaneous way to exchange very complicated letters. A Private Netsphere means that the information is coded to be more secure – which means that it has some privileged access.”

Eldred tapped around the limited amount of executables, finding the reason for this Private Netsphere near instantly. It was called the OMiRe – the Open Mission Register – and it was even better than old contacts. Medium-sized companies were listing missions for which they would like some extra muscle from small fry.

How difficult was it to get access to this? Likely not too difficult. The jobs lifted were truly entry-level, ranging from doing messenger runs to being a pack mule. It was the kind of work that many wouldn’t have permanent positions in their corporation for. In other words, it was exactly the kind of work Eldred needed right now.

He tapped around until he found the ‘sort by payment’ option.

Finding the right mission was difficult. Running errands violated his newly found sense of pride and his remaining self-preservation. His mother had done that job. She had died because she carried the wrong message from the wrong person at the wrong time. Carrying anonymous packages was a gamble that he did not care to take.

He wanted control over his fate. The missions to be a mule for a larger expedition were a bit better. If nothing else popped up, he would take one of them, though he would loathe to be under orders of someone else.

It, however, seemed that he did not have to take that risk.

‘Simple mineral extraction mission. Payment by the amount of minerals delivered. New Foundations Company.’

A simple summary for a mission that he was all too eager to take. Registering himself on the website was easy. That the system put him under the Shorn Company was a little lie he was entirely prepared to take advantage of. He would correct that mistake in due time. Once he had sent the application for the job, detailing that he and Nyx would take it, he received an automated response.

‘Due to our trust and safety regulations, we do not accept parties below 3 people. We welcome your renewed application after you have entered a 3rd member!’

That was a solvable problem.