Lost and Found

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As expected, Brenda had been figuratively tripping over herself to save “Kira” from rat-infested squalor or homelessness. Actually packing Qhila’s things had been fairly easy as well, helped along tremendously by his inventory and a quick order of moving boxes from the Abyss Auction. The closest thing to a challenge was convincing his mom to not come help them pack. The key to that had been a line about needing someone to nurse them back to health if John and “Kira” got sick from being near the rats.

Relocation done, he was in bed and ostensibly going to sleep. In reality, he was fairly sure tomorrow was going to be an energy drink day regardless, and he had a few notifications that he had decided could wait. The first one had actually shown up while he was heading home from Christie’s, but he had pondered the question of a rare candy test subject first and then ran into the rat ogre before he got to it.

Getting a Quest for something he was going to do anyway was always nice, and it seemed like doing things for Christie was, indeed, the way to get into Lord Chastain-Wessel’s good graces.

There was just one problem with this. After using two candies on test subjects, he only had enough candies to get her to Level 5 if he included the lewd rare candy. And he would rather fight ten rat ogres at once unarmed than ask permission to give Christie that one.

Achievement Unlocked: Marlboro used Bad Breath
Kill something level 10 or higher using only poison damage
What did you do, lock it in your room?
Reward: 100 EXP, 50$, Catalyze Toxin Skill

That was absolutely awesome. While all of the poisons Qhila made regular use of had low to atrocious DPS, several of them also had durations measured in hours or even days. While the mana cost was too high to spam this casually, it would serve nicely as an execute for Bosses and the like. They could probably have skipped the **** rage pseudo-phase of the last Dungeon Boss almost entirely.

Achievement Unlocked: Love Nest
Have a girl that you are romantically or sexually involved with move into your home.
How much are you paying her in reverse rent?
Reward: +100% health regeneration while cuddling a girl you live with.

That was kinda niche, but it was also free so no complaints there. His small notification stack looked through, he pulled up the sleep menu, but was interrupted by activity in the party chat.

[Qhila]: Are you still awake?

[John]: Yes. Trouble sleeping?

[Qhila]: I think it’s the window. Sleeping above ground feels wrong… Do you have a basement?

[John]: Yeah, though it’s kinda cluttered. Nothing a barrier can’t solve though, I suppose.

[John]: Or… would cuddles help? And can we do that discreetly enough that mom doesn’t find out?

[Qhila]: Yes. And yes, but why?

[John]: Just come in here and I’ll explain.

He received no response, but shortly afterwards Qhila appeared in his room from seemingly thin air in the barrier pose. She was still under the effect of the humanis elixir. She was also naked and the gloom only made the sight more enticing, leaving him rock hard in the moments it took her to confirm that the door was locked and attaching a trap module to it.

“It’s set to quiet alarm, so the keystone in my bracelet will vibrate if an aura moves around in the hallway,” she explained in a whisper while crawling under his blanket. John was a smidge too heterosexual to have noticed the bracelet until she mentioned it.

“Not that you aren’t also gorgeous normally,” he pulled her into a spoon, “but sometime, I want to try having sex while you’re like this too.”

“I noticed,” she commented drily, but wiggled a bit against him too. Not with much enthusiasm though, but he couldn’t fault her for not being in the mood considering everything. And perhaps for the best, she wasn’t exactly quiet…

Instead, he gave the promised explanation, “I… Well, I told Mom about… how I feel about you. And that you can’t return those feelings. I left her with the impression that it was because of trauma, which kinda makes sense of humans. But it’s also far from a given and it’s easier for people to come to think that they can’t, or don’t deserve to, feel love than it is to actually become unable to.”

“So if it looks to her like we’re acting like a couple, she’ll think we’re wrong about me, and we have no real way to convince her otherwise?” She sounded about as glum as expected, given the topic, so he gave her a sympathetic squeeze.

“Yes. Or worse, it’ll look like you lied and are leading me on to take advantage of me. And I honestly think she’d be less angry if you burned down the house…”

“... You’re lucky you have her.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled lightly. “But if I tell her that she’ll say she’s just being a decent mom.”

They were quiet for a little bit, and John’s thoughts began circling the elephant in the room. “What do we do about the rat ogres? Or whoever is sending them? I don’t think it’s just random leftovers from the Emerald Order…”

“Clearly not. Or if it is, someone collected them and sent them my way. Unfortunately that doesn’t tell us much.”

“There aren’t any people or groups with a reputation for rat ogres or alchemy in the area aside from the Emerald Order?”

“There are but… low alchemy isn’t exactly a rare skill and the quality of rat ogre we’ve had to deal with is neither difficult nor expensive to make. I’ve looked into them a bit since the ones in the forest. Formulae collections with low grade Hyde serum included start at a few thousand, and materials for one rat ogre cost about $500. The reason people don’t make them in droves is because they’re dumb as bricks, prone to causing trouble, and live for around 2 weeks.”

John sighed and tried to think about what else might help them figure it out. A staple line of questioning from crime shows sprang to mind. “Well, if that’s a dead end, what about the why? Can you think of why someone might be targeting you? Is anyone angry at you or something?”

“Orronth would be bloody furious if he knew I was alive, but that would require anyone caring enough to follow my tracks into giant spider territory to find out that I didn’t get eaten. And even if he found out, he’d at minimum send a professional bounty hunter. Sending in rat ogres as trap fodder makes sense, but letting us just pack up and leave afterwards… that smells like half-assing, amateur hour, or someone that needs to worry about us flipping the script on them if the rats all die to traps.

“With that in mind, I guess the best suspect would be another scavenger that thinks I beat them to a big score and is doing this out of spite, or someone who recently got started slaving and doesn’t mind the price reduction for ‘lightly ****’ merchandise.”

For the sake of not grinding his teeth to dust in useless anger, John focused on the “price” part of that over the “lightly ****”. When he had ended up on the slaves section of the Abyss Auction web page, the sorting had been on ‘price, ascending’ and the cheapest **** on offer was a gnome with a current bid of just over 300 bucks. “...Wouldn’t they be operating at a massive loss right now?”

Qhila sighed heavily. “If I was any other kind of kobold, yes. But Orronth doesn’t operate with exile as a punishment the way most tribes do. Instead, members that would get exiled are sterilized and sold.” Her whisper slowly faltered in volume, until only the nightly quiet allowed him to make out her words at all, and only barely. “That means the only real population of Skytails is his, and between scarcity and being purpose designed for sexual use… Skytails usually auction for six figures…”

“Six fig-” He caught himself, having accidentally raised his voice in surprise. “Six figures?!? Holy shit. That’s… holy shit.” Even as the callous cruelty of the Abyss and Qhila’s relative vulnerability to predation had been sinking in, John hadn’t really been able to help feeling like she might be a touch paranoid. Understandably paranoid, but still. This figurative puzzle piece turned all of that completely on its head. Even in the Abyssal economy, that was a lot of money. In that light, it seemed a feat of courage that she ever left her nest at all.

After a few seconds to digest that, he sighed. “Okay. I see how ‘who would want to do that?’ doesn’t narrow it down much. If anything, I’m just glad now that there weren't ten times as many rat ogres. But it also means whoever is doing this has six figures worth of reason to come up with a new tactic now that you’re living too far away from an Alley entrance for rat ogres, so we really need to put a stop to this. And if we can’t figure out who’s behind it and get them in trouble with the law, our only real option is to become too risky a target. Which means we have to find a guild, and a fairly strong one, because I don’t think we can Level grind to outscale a hundred rat ogres, or whatever other bullshit six figures minus profit can buy, fast enough. So we have to make a decision and start pursuing it from tomorrow…”

“You mean you need to make a decision.”

“What? No! Just like with the loot and DP being as much your effort as mine, this is about your future just as much as it’s about mine and you deserve as much of a say as-” he stopped as she reached up and put a finger against his mouth in a wordless request that he be quiet.

“I know, John. That’s not what I meant.” She paused, removing her finger. “As long as we can stick together and avoid True Dragons, I don’t think there’s anywhere you would be able to tolerate that I wouldn’t be fine with. It’s not your decision because I don’t have a say, it’s your decision because you’ll be more selective and because with me being a feeble race, you’re the one who’s going to have to sell us as a package deal and that’s gonna be a crapshoot if we’re trying to join a guild you don’t really want to be in.”

“I guess that makes some sense, but what about your aspirations for the future? Isn’t there anything you want to do or accomplish?”

Qhila was quiet for a bit, then replied with a tone of half-hearted objection, “Are you really going to make me say it?”

“I don’t follow…”

“I thought it was a pipe dream.” Qhila’s response was a barely audible whisper. “But still, since escaping Orronth, I have only had one thing I hoped for. Somehow finding someone I could trust enough to call my friend… ‘stick together’ covers what I want from the future.”

For a long moment, he could do nothing but hold her tight and feel deeply grateful to the universe and to Gaia for giving him the opportunity to do something so important, to be someone so important for the ****, lonely, wonderful, badass girl in his arms.

But just holding her wasn’t enough. Because just holding her wouldn’t ensure that they could stick together going forward. She had put her faith in him to choose the right guild to be their future home, and he had to live up to that and actually make a decision.

Joining a guild that was part of the war against the Emerald Order was right out. Aside from the fact that signing up for combat duty to escape rat ogres was going from the frying pan and into the fire, he couldn’t sign up to go to war when he couldn’t even tell his mom. Difficulty controlled barrier runs were one thing, active battlefields were something else entirely.

With still needing a guild with enough weight behind to act as a deterrent, or be potentially helpful in finding out who was behind the rat ogres, that left the business oriented guilds with a presence in Springfield.

That was still a lot of guilds to go through. John’s biggest reservation was definitely going to be about morals. Completely avoiding guilds that did things he’d consider shady was probably not in the cards, then again it likely wouldn’t have been in the cards for mundane businesses either. When it came to securing Qhila’s safety and his family’s, he could live with an organization that sometimes got nasty as long as it wasn’t their main shtick, and it wasn’t something he got dragged into. Then, if he was right about how big of a deal Level 100+ was, he could start pushing for cleaning up the guild’s act more once he had that weight to throw around.

The problem with approaching selection from that angle was that digging up the details on a guild’s ethics was easier said than done. Sure, there were some that were unabashedly vile or where it was an open secret. But even in a society as callous and mercenary as the Abyss, there were a lot of reasons that a guild might be discreet about its more heartless activities. Which meant that evaluating it required spending time digging into their activities and possibly some sizing up in person, unless you had someone trustworthy on hand that already had. Which meant they had to narrow down the field by other means, or they’d still be at it come Thanksgiving.

Using his and Qhila’s current competences as a starting point wasn’t great either. Sure, it did rule out a few, but as Qhila said, alchemy wasn’t a rare skill. Not the ‘low’ variety anyway. Much like mundane chemistry, it was everywhere, from the obvious chemical and medicinal businesses across Abyssal foodstuffs to the various lubricants, surface treatments, paints, oils and more used in just about any sort of manufacturing whether machined or hand made.

But more than that, John’s Gamer Barriers and the ability to use spell components to direct the loot type meant he could feasibly set up as in-house materials provider for just about any Abyssal business that used materials at all.

No, as much as he had been trying to avoid that particular line of approach, what it came down to was a question of what he wanted to do with his life. What he wanted to be when he finished his education.

As usual, even consciously considering the question filled his chest with a dull ache he usually avoided. Getting a scholarship to Ashcroft had been a relief despite meaning he would be in the same school as Frank and Vanessa for longer, because it let him put off any real decisions relating to what came next.

But it was no longer just about himself, and career prospects, and falling a year or two behind his peers on whatever he ended up doing. It was about Qhila’s safety, and it was possibly about his mom’s safety. And he didn’t know when he hit the deadline, when shit would hit the fan next if he didn’t make it. So the only thing to do was put on his figurative big boy pants and get to it.

Only, when he refused to back away from actually considering the question, he found exactly what he had on some level known would be there all along but avoided consciously thinking. The dull ache turned into a gnawing pit of emptiness as the truth behind his indecision was unmasked. He had already made this decision years ago and it had been torn to shreds by a drunk driver on a small road in the middle of nowhere.

But along with the void of festering loss and unhealed grief came a small light of hope that had been born yesterday on the school rooftop with Christie. Maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t been irreparably damaged after all. Clinging to that glimmer of hope, and taking strength and comfort from Qhila’s closeness as he had from Christie’s, he grappled with the suffocating yoke of those feelings. And came up short.

Even then, in the throes of emotional pain much too crushing for tears, he refused to back down. Because it wasn’t just about himself, it was about Qhila and she deserved better. And if hope alone wasn’t enough to shine through the darkness, he had another flame to bring to bear.

Intentionally, he flashed the memory of finding rat ogres wrecking havoc in Qhila’s nest before his eyes, and the image of her hanging limp and naked in the grasp of the one that had tried to **** her on the day they met. His fury at the violating cruelty of their actions and intentions was stoked to a blaze in an instant, and then he turned it inwards. Because if something like that happened again after he had failed to set a course towards greater safety, then it would be partially his fault for allowing it in his weakness.

And in the light of hope, wrath, and a strange sense of wry tranquility that descended at the realization that however self destructive his method he was now making some sort of progress, he understood something he had only vaguely grasped as a child and shied away from since.

Learning about machines, messing around with tools in the garage, and making childish attempts at mimicking technical drawings had been more than just a fun way to learn things from his dad. On some level, he had felt a connection to something more than himself. Felt that he was standing on a foundation his father had built and walking in his footsteps.

Deep down, he realized, that was why as much as he enjoyed art, gaming, and even some tinkering with code and game design, he had never thought about any of those as possible careers. Because they didn’t have that.

But he couldn’t return to mechanical engineering either. Trying would mean having to fight this battle every day, and his only way to win it… While the therapy following his father’s **** had ultimately done little to assuage his despair, it had taught him some introspection. Making a habit of what John was doing now was a poison of the mind that would destroy him as surely as the guilt of indecision would if Qhila came to harm.

But if he could not find meaning in doing something that didn’t bring that feeling of connection to a greater legacy, and he could not return to his father’s footsteps, that left him at an impasse. And then it hit him.

He might not have his dad anymore. But he had someone else. Someone who brightened up nigh any room he entered, who had made healing the wounded and sick his life’s work, who had tried to fight tyranny across the globe in his youth, and had fought an unknown assailant to protect someone he loved just last week. Someone whose footsteps were very much worth following in.