Startup 32: Forensic Accounting

Arodus 25, evening

The smooth, cold stones pressed against my face were almost comforting next to the throbbing agony on my back. I didn’t even consciously ask for the pain to stop as I woke, but Autopilot acted on my bleary need. The fire in my veins was familiar now, as the conjured infernal blood knit my wounds closed. It took three minutes for the pain to fade to three lines of sensitive skin, and three spell slots.

Only three strikes. Damn. I guess autopilot was right. Scourge’s whip game is shit. Oh. Oh no. I just used half my first level spells. Fuck. I’m an idiot.

I staggered to my feet and looked around. I was in a dark room, surrounded by stone walls and metal bars. I could make out three other cells nearby with the strange black on black vision granted to me as a drow. I could just barely make out a muscular form in chitinous plate guarding the holding cells, patrolling back and forth in front of me.

I checked the door; it was closed but unlocked. The hinges let loose an unholy groan as I pushed it open, drawing the attention of my guard. He wasn’t one of the four mutated guards I’d traveled with; instead he seemed to be a perfectly normal orcish guy in a well maintained suit of armor. He nodded at me politely, without making any move to stop me from leaving.

“Shadow of the Daughter,” he said, saying the words like a title. “I see you are well, and have grown robust. I was expecting you to lie flat for hours more. Here, let me get your house robe.”

“I’ve recently learned how to take a punch.” I said, confused.

What did he call me?

My title as the heir’s prime consort. Husband is a surface term; I am her shadow. I’m to be her right hand and companion. Speaking of which, we have duties to attend to.

It was surreal to wake up from being beaten into unconsciousness and simply walk it off, but nobody seemed to have any objection. The skin on my back still felt a bit tight, but I had no difficulty moving. I let Autopilot guide my feet while I took in the halls of House D’Lann. The orc trailed along behind me, obviously serving as a guard.

I could break him. He had no signs of magical or alchemical enhancement, even the internal kind people like Syl upon to strengthen their bodies. (What a man can do)

Ok, so he’s probably not a badass. That’s good. He seems polite enough; I hope I can avoid fucking him over too badly. Wait; I can detect stuff like Syl’s martial talents?

If and only if they reach beyond that which is natural using ki, alchemy, or the like. Most who train beyond a certain level begin to draw upon some form of magic whether they know it or not. Anyone stronger than, say, Rosie would likely start to cultivate their body beyond what is typically possible simply by doing what works.

I pondered that until entering a small, cramped office piled with heaps of papers. Nobody had stepped in to pick up the slack when Emrys vanished, it seemed. Azog, the orc, was slightly surprised when I asked for his name, but fairly willing to stand outside of the small, cramped confines of my dusty office.

I wasn’t about to do anything too drastic before I knew my surroundings. Tipping my hand could cost me days, or my life, and I didn’t know enough to tailor my plan yet. That, and I had budgeted my time with missions in mind. I needed to know what Emrys’s last fantasy was so I could decide if it was viable to pursue. As such, I needed to play ball for at least a short time, and that meant going through Emrys’s desk and doing his job until dinner.

Autopilot was an incredible speed reader, or perhaps just lucky. He could scan through a pile of random papers or an entire journal and extract a thesis statement nine times out of ten. While he sorted through the papers and extracted the relevant data for me, I went over the fruits of my new perk. I’d sacrificed four feats to the altar of Inheritance, and received five back.

Carys, it seemed, was an ice mage. I was starting to suspect that my menu was a little bit lazy; ice magic from Carys, summoning from Kiyon… hell, even the martial arts might be lifted directly from Dovnu. I wasn’t complaining, though I did wonder why I hadn’t picked up anything from Nendra’s skillset.

The first few talents altered how I could use my frost blast, making it far more flexible. Extended Range did exactly what it sounded like, upping the range of my blast from 35 feet to 150 feet, which opened up things like shooting someone on another ship during a boarding action. Explosive Orb allowed me to create a cold snap in a small area, about five feet in diameter; someone could dive out of the way if they were quick on their feet, but it wasn’t reliant on my ability to aim. If I added a spell slot, I could pump up the size to a fifteen foot radius and make it nearly impossible to completely dodge. That was followed up with a rather cheeky talent called Epicenter, which made me immune to my own frost blasts.

Yes sir, Mr. Menu. Drop a giant ice blast at my own feet when surrounded. I’ll get right on that. If I’d had this with the ghouls I… probably wouldn’t have used it that way. I was surrounded by allies that weren’t immune to my blasts even if I was. Real nice for freezing them on the way to the ship, though.

I got a little bit excited when I saw my fourth new perk: Gather Power. It allowed me to spend a move action to reduce the spell cost of my next blast by one. At first I misread it as working on any spell or talent, but no. Only destruction sphere ice blasts. Still extremely good, especially since I could move freely while Autopilot did his best Dragonball Z impression, but not quite to the level of making my summons free. It also didn’t stack, so I could fire off a free aoe or boost the damage, but I’d need to pay something if I wanted to do both.

The final talent was weird; Energy Leap. It allowed me to shoot myself in a straight line, up to the maximum range of my frost blast, as long as nothing was in the way. As I said, the maximum range was now 150 feet; that’s a pretty good burst of speed and it could even launch me through open space or straight up. It cost a spell point, but qualified for a Gather Power discount.

Is there anything I can’t outrun with a sprint like that? Damn it. I want to test this out, but it looks like I might damage the books if I did that.

I had a bit of pep back in my system when I shifted my focus back to the papers, which mostly seemed to be written reports from Nendra’s various managers, if not Nendra herself.

Alright, so what do we have here?

“Fire beetle trainers beaten for incompetence and dismissed. Claimed that they were ‘too stupid for complex duties requiring patience or differentiation of humanoids’. Kill this batch of beetles, find better trainers for the next attempt. Trained personal guard beetles will be the next big thing.”

“Payment to House L’Rath for Abyssal Ichor: 50 gold pieces.”

“In-house sorcerer conversion of dwarven ****, age 12, failed. No salvageable materials.”

“Whipping has proven ineffective on field slaves. Purchase heavier whips; perhaps the ones with shards of glass integrated into the design? 2 gold each is stiff, but results will no doubt pay off within a few months.”

“Request for additional **** rations: rejected. 3 copper per day per **** is far too much. We don’t want to coddle them.”

As I read through the summaries Autopilot provided me with, my eyes widened in horror. It was all so utterly sloppy. I wasn’t thrilled with the slavery or cruelty, of course, but I didn’t know slavery. Not really. What I knew, deep in my soul, was accounting.

Nendra was in charge of only a few businesses under Dovnu, and they were almost all complete train wrecks. The only one that was making a profit was a mushroom colony that produced both food and **** at an alarming rate. Miss Mih’Tzi J’Tar was apparently a one woman mushroom plantation.

I lost track of time as I hunted down and completely reworked the balance sheet Emrys was apparently in charge of. It would seem that “managing the household” was part of a drow husband’s role, and that was not a fancy term for cooking and cleaning. I was supposed to keep track of Nendra’s finances, and apparently she hadn’t bothered to put anyone else on the job while I was gone.

I really wasn’t expecting my degree to come up this often.

I spent a few hours in the room under the watchful eye of Azog, who peeked in every five to ten minutes. I wasn’t sure if Nendra was busy, or if she was simply content to let me waste time.

Or she’s off commissioning some kind of antimagic manacles for me. Uh. How much would those cost, actually?

Magical ones that completely prevent all forms of spellcasting? Several thousand gold pieces. The normal ones that prevent the use of somatic components are only about 65. We always keep a few in stock.

I smiled. Looking at Nendra’s current finances, it seemed blessedly unlikely she would be able to realistically afford the good stuff. Nor would she be able to put a bounty on my head big enough to draw in anyone really scary, at least according to Autopilot. I had run through a lot of hypotheticals on the trip over, guessing at potential stumbling blocks my dear wife might throw at me, and while a disturbing number of them were in her price range, Dovnu wasn’t going to bankroll her on this. She’d need to rely on her own savings and credit, something she didn’t seem to have much experience with.

I ran through the accounts, trying to read between the lines. Emrys had been, to be perfectly frank, somewhere between mediocre and completely incompetent. Money vanished frequently after being allocated, with sometimes as much as five percent of a project’s budget vanishing into the ether. The only place where these kinds of errors weren’t happening constantly was with the one competently run business Nendra oversaw. The mushroom colony. That tended to consistently be slightly over budget, a fact masked by the substantial revenues generated.

Wait.

I ran through the reports again until I found one written on dirt smudged parchment. The top report in the stack was a short note written in cramped, spiky handwriting and requested that Emrys arrange for more fertilizer. Not Nendra, as most of the papers were addressed to Emrys. As I suspected, I felt warm as I read her note.

Not incompetent, then. Crooked and probably a simp. Not bad, Emrys, though you’re lucky the IRS never took a look at this. Looks like I’ve got to meet Miss J’Tar as soon as possible. Also, thank the gods you’re not a perv, Emrys. I was worried the last fantasy would be with your mother.

••••••••••

I finished up in the office, preparing a list of vague proposals for how to cut costs and eliminate waste on the existing businesses. Of course, I didn’t actually know a damn thing about beetle ranching and knew even less about subterranean chattel slavery. What little I did know about the use of **** labor amounted to the number of degrees of separation you need between half-starved third world kids and a smartphone before people stopped caring.

I’d honestly recommend reinvesting more into the mushroom business legitimately, if I weren’t fairly certain that Nendra would take that as a recommendation to slaughter the slaves and beetles wholesale to save on food costs. That just seemed to be her style.

I needed to know more, both to fulfill my self-imposed fiduciary duty and to plan my escape. That meant taking a look at the businesses in question.

I saw surprisingly few drow while I toured the D’Lann family tunnels, and those I did tended to be in heavy leather coats. None of them had the glowing eyes that would mark them as drow nobles. They took one look at my thin silk robe, politely nodded, and kept moving, eager to get back to whatever it was they did.

The only place I saw drow working was in a large cavern that functioned as a gym or dojo. Dozens of drow in form fitting silk bodysuits accented with metal plates sparred with one another, mostly fencing. The crossbow firing range was occupied by a trio of shambling pale figures, who mostly failed to dodge out of the way of the bolts.

Undead. Easy enough to animate with whatever corpses happen to be available, and generally they can be repaired by the low priestesses. Far better targets than simple wooden posts.

There were perhaps a dozen drow present, far fewer than the cavern could have supported, and that included the bored looking woman in a tight robe that controlled the zombie targets. The next cavern over contained ten times as many soldiers in chitin armor, mostly orcs and hobgoblins.

I saw Dovnu in the center of an arena, taking on two soldiers at a time. She was so small compared to her soldiers, but that didn’t matter once her whip started flashing. Most of her opening shots were aimed low, targeting knees and ankles to knock her opponents off balance and then raining follow up strikes down once they were on the ground. I watched for only a few moments before scurrying off; I didn’t know what Dovnu would think of me taking a stroll, but I didn’t want to risk getting assigned some random task.

Or being pulled into the arena. Get my ass whooped or show her how strong I’ve gotten? Lose lose. Oh. That's also assuming I can take these guys. I could get my ass whooped and show her how strong I’ve gotten all at once.

I passed through the **** pens almost as quickly, frowning as I did. The slaves allocated to Nendra were the darkblind ones, mostly humans and halflings. They huddled in pools of light generated by small fireplaces, watched over by looming hobgoblins in the shadows. They were dreadfully thin, as well, which made sense given their food budget.

Worst of all, at least from Dovnu’s perspective, was that they weren’t very profitable. She’d gotten them for cheap as part of a deal with one of the other houses, but hadn’t really had a plan for them. Nendra, thus far, had mostly tried to turn the young ones into sorcerers for the resale value and have the rest assist in the mushroom colony. All of the potential sorcerers had died after consuming deadly doses of abyssal quintessence, and the amateur farmers hadn’t done much more than bumble around in the dark unless provided with light by their overseers.

In summary, they are living in a dark pit with barely enough food, and any kids they might have are being dragged away to be lethally transformed into a lottery ticket. I’m unironically pretty sure selling them off would be the kindest thing to do, short of freeing them, but they’d never be allowed to leave. They might not know exactly where they are, but they know more about Heslandaena than any outsider is allowed to.

Calm down Curtis. You can’t save them all. Probably can’t save many of them, realistically. Definitely not if you let yourself get distracted.

The beetle farm was small, full of glowing orange scarab beetles the size of golden retrievers. I knew from the reports that the actual way that Nendra made money from these guys was bottling and selling the bioluminescent fluid that caused them to glow. In an airtight bottle that would stop it from drying out, it was like a glow stick that lasted a decade. Cheaper to produce at scale than an everburning torch, even taking into account that the beetles needed to reach adulthood. Dovnu had charged Nendra with finding some way to make the business more profitable. It wasn’t going well.

Mistress Vorys D’Lann’Nes, the overseer that reported to Nendra, was not in the small home she’d been allocated near the beetles. Azog’s eyes just about popped out of his head when I tried to pick the lock on the front door. I didn’t manage it, anyway. A thin icicle is no replacement for a proper lockpick. (Disable Device 5+11=16)

“Shadow!” He spluttered, “Please! The mistress will be most cross with you!”

“Which one?” I asked casually, “My bitch wife or the lady that’s probably embezzling?”

D’Lann’Nes. Lesser branch, probably adopted into the family like the chick at the docks.

“Probably neither.” A goblin rancher called over to us. “No one lives in that house. They won’t notice.”

Azog stiffened, glaring down at the interruption, but I stopped him with a raised hand.

I took a look at the goblin, who was leaning against a rock looking out over the beetle enclosure. He was happily puffing away on a small pipe filled with dried mushrooms. By the smell, I was fairly certain they were not ones with any medicinal properties. (Knowledge Nature 12+3=15)

“She doesn’t?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. “How often do you see her, then?”

“When she has new orders, sometimes.” The goblin shrugged. “Other times she just sends a letter with the new trainers. Take a few beetles, yell at them, then those beetles are next for harvest and the trainers go away.”

“Are you in charge of disposal, then?” I asked. “How does that happen?”

“One quick blow to back of head, in carapace crack.” The goblin informed me, “die easily.”

“No, I meant after the beetle was dead.” I explained, kneeling to meet his eyes, “what happens to the body after the ichor is drained?”

Goblins are crazy, but they are also creative little shits.

“We take best parts.” The goblin answered with a shrug. He held up his pipe, which seemed to be made of black carapace. “Then throw in tunnels.”

I steepled my fingers, smiling.

“Best parts, eh?” I asked, “Meat, that kind of thing?”

“Only on a bad month.” The goblin told me. “Tastes terrible unless you boil it long time. Then still tastes bad, but because not enough flavor instead of too much.”

“And their legs can be made into pipes?” I pressed, “Are they sturdy?”

“No, crack easily.” The goblin shrugged. “But easy to make after scooping out the meat. Sometimes wife likes bits of shell, when they still glowing.”

“They glow? For how long?”

It didn’t exactly seem like a big money maker, but I saw potential. I filed away the information for later; I didn’t see any reason to avoid doing some good while I was here, even if I did so by fixing Nendra’s finances.

I only had one more place that I really had an excuse to go to. If I was to survey my wife’s finances, I had every reason to visit the mushroom colony. More importantly, I was curious to meet Miss Mih’Tzi J’Tar.

Dozens of kobolds were industriously tending to the fungus that wallpapered the caverns, and made way for me and Azog, pointing me towards their mistress when asked. One chamber was absolutely filled with oyster mushrooms, though I didn’t linger long; those grow reasonably well in shit, if the smell was anything to go by.

Autopilot was able to fill me in on the majority of mushrooms, and did so enthusiastically, creating a cacophony in the back of my head as he tried to explain the medicinal or recreational uses for dozens of fungi at once. I didn’t catch any of it, and didn’t bother reading the recaps in my log. That could wait.

If anything, I was relieved to find a bare spot where I could rest my gaze without an unprompted knowledge check pounding at my temples. A narrow square frame was built into the wall, filled with a pile of grainy brown sand.

Sawdust, actually. You see, we import it from the surface because-

Oh shut the fuck up!

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the deluge of mycological trivia to cease. I barely heard Azog speak, and was not at all expecting to feel a slight figure brush against my back, leaving a single delicate hand upon my shoulder.

I opened my eyes to see a dirt covered glove slowly passing over the sawdust, leaving a deep orange smudge across my vision. Transmutation, the magic of altering matter and living things. As the aura settled into the planter, thick white stalks with dark brown ends swelled out of the dust, growing into large shiitake mushrooms with huge caps over the course of moments.

“I’m glad that you returned, Lord M’Dair,” she said, inches from my ear, “I worried for your safety.”

Her fingers brushed against the back of my hand as she pulled away from the planter, sending a magical tingle up my arm. I turned to look at the woman who could only be Mih’Tzi J’Tar, the woman who I would have bear my children.

You would have her what now?