City of Opportunities 4 – The Bearable Cold

Eldred woke up on a flat mattress in a starlit room. He was naked, a fact he was readily reminded of by another gust that drifted in through the broken window, to be then pulled down through the hole in the floor.

The cold had woken him. It was warm in this district, though he had no idea if that was a permanent fixture of this chunk of soil or if it just was the local season. Weather in Iridescia was weird. He had been born and raised in the city and he still knew that. That just came with the territory of living in an infinitely sprawling city situated in an interstice of untold worlds.

Carefully, he moved. The bruises from the previous day hurt more now that they had a moment to stiffen up. They also looked worse, having changed colour from fresh red to a more unnatural shade of purple.

Eldred hissed once, then just **** himself to move through the pain. He picked up his top and bottom, putting them over himself. Then, he just sat there for a moment and tried to digest what had actually happened.

He remembered yesterday like it was a dream. Had he not woken up in this room right now, he would assume it had been. That person he had been over the last 24 hours was entirely divorced from the one he had been for more than two decades prior. Now that he had actually slept on the events, from his involvement in the alleyway, the beating up, all the way to bedding a banshee, he realized that it was just… ludicrous.

Sitting on that broken bed, in his old clothes, he had a simple choice to make: forget all of that had ever happened or forge ahead.

‘What an idiotic thing to even contemplate.’ He laughed, tilting his head back, letting his amusement ring even louder, until it reverberated in the entire building – his entire building. ‘Better to die than to kill myself, no… how do they say? Better to burn out than to fade away.’

Eldred tried to get on his feet. The motion was sluggish. Was he still cold or did it have another reason? His eyes drifted around the room. It was clean – too clean. From the now flat mattress to the hole in the floor, there was no sign left of ectoplasm. He went for the open door, checking the corridor. The only thing he expected to find there and that was actually there was his discarded rain jacket.

He walked over and picked it up.

“Nyx?” he asked aloud as he shook out the jacket.

“Yes, Eldred?”

The voice of the banshee in his ear had him let out a sigh of relief. He shook out the dusty jacket, then put it over his shoulders. “I was worried for a moment I had dreamt all of that.”

“I did not wish to intrude.”

Eldred looked around, trying to find the ghost woman around him. When that failed, he asked, “Where are you?”

“Besides you, though incorporeal.” She stayed her voice for a moment before admitting. “I’m avoiding manifesting a visible form. It drains from your life ****. You are weaker than I thought.”

“So that would be why I feel so stiff?” He asked and rolled his shoulders.

“I apologise.”

“Don’t. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.” He bounced on his heel, forcing his body to stay in motion despite the multitude of aches. “It just means I have to grow stronger.” He carefully advanced down the corridor. Starlight fell in through the windows, but that was scarcely enough to know where he put his feet. “What happened to all of the ectoplasm?”

“As I no longer haunt this building, it has dissolved.”

“Makes enough sense.” Eldred stopped in front of the staircase. With no windows along its length and the damages it had sustained, it was half a **** trap. “Funny that I think that’s the biggest challenge I’ve had since getting here,” he thought aloud.

“I can solve this for you,” Nyx offered.

“Oh?” Eldred was wondering what she would do. Summon a ghost light, perhaps? “By all means.”

“Should I manifest?”

“Yes.” There was no need to think about that one. What was the highest priority was to do whatever he could to keep her beside him always. The sooner he got to training himself, the better.

Hands of ice gripped his spine and yanked it out of his back. Chilled blood pumped through his veins, spreading the frozen pain through his entire body. He shivered, head to toe, as if he was out alone and underdressed on a midwinter night. The lost warmth streamed into Nyx’s invisible form, allowing her to manifest.

She hovered beside him, her legs partially pulled in, her face next to his. Icy blue eyes scanned him, every bit as forlorn as they had been before. There was worry there – then, delightful surprise.

Eldred put an arm around his banshee and pulled her against his chest. His meaning was understood, her lips parted to receive his. Once more, he tasted the midnight air, the mint, and the mild note of honey sweetness on her lips. While their tongues mingled, his hand found the fullness of one of her breasts beneath her tattered dress. It fit wonderfully in his hand – a fated match as far as he was concerned.

Though there was a lot to the kiss that served to remind him of what he had gained, there was one aspect that was different now. “You’re warm,” he whispered, managing to put a finger’s width between their lips.

“I draw my presence from your life now, not the coldness of this building,” Nyx whispered back. “Is it not… unpleasant?”

It was deeply unpleasant, though Eldred refused to show it. Every moment that she remained manifest was like someone was pouring ice water down his back, with no sign of numbing. “The reward makes it more than tolerable,” he said and gave her boob another light squeeze. There was much else about her that deserved similar appreciation, but he was a simple man with a simple appreciation for boobs first and foremost.

Though bigger tits had a generally bigger allure, that was superseded by the fact that the best boobs were the ones he got to touch.

Nyx giggled. It was a quiet sound, barely audible behind the hand she used to cover her mouth in a ladylike gesture. “I apologize again,” she said. “Your constitution is weaker than I thought, but your will is like corded steel.”

The compliment made Eldred feel like he could take on the world, which made his question a bit ironic. “So, how will you help me with these stairs?” he asked.

Nyx pressed the light switch on the wall next to the railing. The lumen crystals above them flickered to life. Some continued to flicker the entire time, most completely activated. It was such a simple and unexpected solution that Eldred simply laughed.

“You could have just told me that the lights are working,” he told her. “No need for you to manifest and press the switch yourself.”

Guilt appeared immediately on the banshee’s features. “Oh.”

The single syllable had Eldred laugh even louder. If he had minded the pain of keeping her present, he would have had a conniption. Instead, he just pulled her along. Having a hovering armpiece was quite pleasant. Though he had no Core, no company and only a ruin to his name, he still felt like he had acquired the most important part of the successful entrepreneur experience.

Admittedly, his ruin had just gone up in value. “Is there a working Pulsar in here?”

“The basement,” Nyx muttered, still guilty.

Eldred pressed a kiss on her cheek. “There is no need to apologise yet again, that amused me,” he told her. It did lift her mood a little bit, difficult as her engraved sadness was to read at times. “Tell me about yourself,” he prompted, “we were swept up in the moment. What did you do here the last 30 years?”

“Little,” Nyx responded. “In earnest, I cannot believe it has been 30 years. I must have spent much of that time sleeping, gathering energy to venture into the lower floors.”

“I suppose passing time by sleeping would be the only way not to go insane in here, all on your own,” Eldred agreed. “And when you had enough energy? You cleaned?”

“I organised,” Nyx clarified with an element of… aristocratic distaste? “I fixed the Pulsar as well. It took many attempts.”

Eldred hummed and walked from the bottom of one staircase to the top of the other. “Impressive.”

“What did you do in your life so far?” Nyx asked, her voice animated by her curiosity. “What produced a man such as you?”

Eldred scratched the back of his head. “It is a boring sto-“ A poorly measured step saw him almost falling forwards and down the flight of stairs. Only a rapidly lowered hand, gripping the railing, had saved him from potentially breaking his neck. Nyx had tried to hold him as well. Her corporeal form lacked the mass to be an actual anchor. “You had regular weight before,” he noted. “Another sign of my weakness?”

“Yes,” she stated, bluntly. “I believe it best if I return to being–“

“No.”

“You are risking–“

“Yes.” Eldred gripped the railing and descended. His banshee pressed her black lips together. If she was annoyed, it was counterbalanced by a different emotion in her eyes. Respect, perhaps? He couldn’t quite say. “The life that made me,” he told her. “Is 24 years of nothing unordinary and then, yesterday, I had a terrible day. I went out to see flowers. I protected some stranger, a woman, from two ruffians. I got beat to an inch of my life. Then, I got saved by that stranger using a health potion on me.”

“She must have been stingy on it if it did not heal you fully.”

Eldred found her tone there more confusing than anything he had heard her say before. Was that possessiveness he heard? Disapproval for how he had been treated? “After that, I went home, found the letter that told me I inherited this building, came here and, well… you know the rest.” He chuckled just as he put his foot on the concrete floor of the basement. Smiling at Nyx, he added. “Two that wasted away in darkness for decades, achieving little. Perhaps we are made for each other, mhm?”

Nyx put a kiss on his cheek, spreading warm tingles through his entire body. “Perhaps,” she whispered in his ear.

The basement was dimly lit. It had been poorly equipped with lumen crystals to start with and they had been thinned out by degradation. Thankfully, there was very little to find in the basement. It was one long room, the singular staircase to access it behind them. Shattered glass cases and broken hardware of crystal and metal showed that this once had been the local server farm.

‘Does a metal-retrieval company need this much server space?’ Eldred wondered.

In a niche by the left side, taking up the entirety of the six metres of space, was the Pulsar. It was a complicated construction of circuitry, pipes and crystals – one of the most impressive fusions of technology and magic that Iridescia had to offer, both in how ingenious they were and how readily available they could be.

It wasn’t the first time Eldred saw one up close. Pulsars were ubiquitous with power generation in Iridescia. They ran on a secondary type of portal residue called Stardust. Unlike Echo, Stardust had no other purpose and was so energy dense that Pulsars typically were destroyed centuries before they would have burned out. Until that happened, each Pulsar provided the connected circuitry with a steady stream of magical energy that could be converted into electricity, heat and even water with relative ease.

Though Pulsars in general were the almost universally used form of power in Iridescia, having a private one in a building was still rare. It wasn’t necessary to set one up unless one really needed to make sure their own power supply was always stable. Eldred looked to the server farm again.

“Am I being paranoid or does this not add up?” he muttered. “Do you know why they have all of these servers?”

“Are they not supposed to?” Nyx asked. “What was this building for?”

“A company that extracted metals from portals.” They wandered the length of the basement, looking around for anything.

“And what are servers?”

Now Eldred blinked at his banshee, who tilted her head back quizzically. He was about to ask her about the oddity of her knowledge gaps, only to realize how futile that would have been. Asking an amnesiac on what they did not know truly would have been the height of foolishness. Sighing, he instead said, “I hope I can just show you. Explaining technology without references sounds… difficult.”

There was nothing else in the basement that grabbed their attention, so they made their way up the stairs. Once there, they separated for the first time. They discovered Nyx couldn’t go more than three metres away from him. He also discovered that she could phase through walls, though that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

‘This does give me ideas,’ he thought, eyes glued to Nyx’s rear. His banshee was halfway through a wall, her upper body entirely disappearing behind the solid matter, leaving only her perfect ass behind, hovering midair. If the aftereffects of their contract hadn’t drained him of the vitality necessary to pop a boner, he would have been fucking her already. ‘I definitely need to get accustomed ASAP.’

The wiggle of her ass did its best to stir that longing back to life. Tiny as the cover of her tattered dress was, she almost succeeded. A pencil skirt would have looked even better on her, a short one that easily rode up all the way…

Eldred’s eyes wandered off her butt for just one moment, drifting to a laptop on the rusty stand right next to it. Returning to the more pleasant roundness, he did not realize what he had spotted until three seconds and a double take later.

Immediately, he walked over.