Dummy's Guide to the Abyss. Part 3

One very important bit of information was missing in order to make that call. Well, more like a category of information, really. He had no idea what the local guilds were like at all. Hopefully, Qhila could help with that. But when he looked at her and saw her concentration as she, in turn, looked at the back of the quest popup, he realized that he was being kinda rude. So he scooted over a bit on the beanbag and gave it a pat next to him. “Come over here, it’s easier to read from this side.”

Qhila looked between his face, the spot on the beanbag he had patted and the window. After a long moment, she hesitantly moved to take the offered seat. While she read the quest options, John pondered what could be the cause of the hesitancy. That line of thought was soon replaced by another concern, as the kobold girl went from looking curious and thoughtful at the quests to having an air of despondency. John was just about to ask what was wrong when she spoke.

“Can we… change the topic for a bit?”

“Uuh, sure…”

“I… can you tell me… what happened while I was passed out? With the Rat Ogre?”

John was more than a little confused by why she wanted to switch to that right now, but he didn’t really have much of a reason to object either. After all, there was no reason they couldn’t circle back to the quests and local guild options. So he told what had happened, trying his best not to sound too pathetic in the process. He even tried to squeeze in a joke when he got to the part where the brute fell over trying to dodge a vial he hadn’t thrown outside the warehouse. It failed to elicit any mirth, though, so he quietly decided not to do more of that, despite having no better ideas on how to alleviate whatever was putting a damper on Qhila’s mood.

The quiet after he finished stretched on. After his botched attempt at humor, he didn’t have any other ideas on how to lift her spirits. He also had no idea what was actually wrong, but for some reason asking her felt like the wrong thing to do. So he just sat there, quietly, and waited.

It felt like a long time, but was in truth probably less than a minute, before she finally spoke. Even through the language barrier, she spoke noticeably haltingly, “... The smart thing to do, for me, would be to push you towards a guild that would be… amenable to who I am. Or towards making one. If you manage to establish yourself… good relations, or even an alliance, with that kind of Late Bloomer would be… invaluable.”

She paused for longer, long enough that John thought she was finished and opened his mouth to respond just as she did continue, “If we had met differently, that’s… what I would have done… But you deserve better. So I’ll… I’ll tell you what I would do if I was given that choice…”

She sighed, then looked up, finally meeting John’s gaze again, and spoke firmly and without hesitation. “Take the third option. Leave the Abyss. There is nothing in it, save for danger and misery.”

“No.” John’s response came immediately, before he had had time to consider it consciously. “Putting aside that I’d be walking away from literal magic and all that, if the Abyss really is as awful as you say, there is no way I would abandon you to face it alone.”

John wasn’t sure how he was expecting Qhila to react to that. Shoving him off, surging to her feet and all but yelling at him with a deeply frustrated expression definitely wasn’t it though. “Why?!? Why do you even bloody care??”

“What?”

“Why. Do. You. Care?” As she spoke, Qhila paced the all of 4 steps there was space for in the area in front of John, making frustrated gestures and getting dangerously close to knocking over the censer. “And don’t give me some shit about me personally. I’m just some random bloody bottom feeder you met less than an hour ago, you don’t have a damn clue about anything ‘me’.”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.” There was definitely more than that as well. For instance, his desire to reach a point where she would offer herself to him sexually, not because she thought he would demand recompensation but because she wanted him to accept. Still, his answer was honest. He did believe it was the right thing to do, and he thought, and certainly hoped, that he would be the kind of man to still do the right thing even absent more selfish motives aligning with his morals.

He probably wouldn’t have had time to think all that if Qhila had reacted as forcefully to this declaration as she had to his last one. Instead of a frustrated eruption, she stared incredulously at him as though he had proposed they jump to the moon or swim across the Pacific. Slowly, a tear welled up in the corner of her eye. When she noticed, she wiped it away furiously and glared at her moistened fingers as though the tear was singularly responsible for every misfortune that had ever befallen her.

She started speaking again, but stopped before she had said enough of a word for the Incense to translate anything. After a moment, she started on a different word and once again stopped before it got anywhere. This continued for a while, melding into an incoherent hodgepodge of half-words interspaced with the occasional sniffle or angry wiping away of tears.

Clearly, she was upset. Given that her RS hadn’t dropped, it probably wasn’t over something she blamed John for, yet it was obviously something that had been triggered by his refusal to leave the Abyss and his reason why. His best guess was that it had to do with something that had happened in her past, but beyond that he had no clue.

She really looked like she needed a hug, though. Or at least, if John felt like she looked to be feeling, he’d want one. The thing was, they were basically strangers, as she had pointed out. But at the same time, they had more than half the RS he had with June, and she had been receptive to a drawing of herself in the nude. That was going a good bit further than a hug. In the end, John decided that he would rather have tried to help her and failed than failed to try.

John rose from the beanbag chair and went directly into kneeling on one knee and wrapping his arms around her. Loosely around her, so she wouldn’t feel trapped. At first, she went completely stiff. Then she pushed away for a fraction of a second before burying her face in his shoulder forcefully enough to almost seem like a failed headbutt. Finally, she went slack, collapsing into him.

All of that happened too fast for John to process the initial resistance to the hug before she had already changed track completely. If it hadn’t, and he had had time to begin letting go of her, or if she hadn’t been so light she felt almost weightless to him, she’d have ended up collapsing onto the floor. Instead, he held her up, while trying not to hold so tightly she would feel trapped, and gently patted her back.

A few minutes passed like that, quiet except for Qhila’s sniffling that never really broke into fully fledged sobs. John still didn’t know what to say, and figured that he should just not say anything then.

“You’re a fool-” the fact that she was still sniffling into his shoulder between words took all the bite out of that statement, “-and you’re going to get yourself killed… Worrying about what’s ‘the right thing to do’ isn’t a luxury Abyssals have. Not unless they’re either very powerful or backed by someone very powerful.”

“Well, I guess the plan is to become one of those two in a hurry then.” John tried his best to sound optimistic without sounding like he didn’t take it seriously.

Before Qhila had time to respond to that, a message tone sounded from a tablet lying on top of a stack of books nearby. Which reminded John of the messages on his own phone, and of him having basically ditched his grandpa. “Fuck!”

Qhila jerked backwards in surprise at his outburst. “What?”

“Sorry, I just remembered that I left my grandfather behind at the recycling center. The mundane version of it, I mean.” He paused to take a closer look at Qhila’s face. Fortunately, she looked to be feeling better now. Or on the way to feeling better, at least.

She also looked like she was feeling awkward about having almost-cried on his shoulder. So he let her go and tried his best to give her an out by continuing on the topic of what he had just remembered, “Before Gaia pushed me into the barrier, I was helping my grandpa. And, uh, it wouldn’t really have made sense for me to take more than 5 minutes or so to get back. Plus, I got two texts when we went between that barrier and the first alley. One of those is probably from him, if not both, and I didn’t have time to respond. So long story short, he’s definitely wondering where I went… and probably worried.”

While talking, he stood up straight and pulled out his phone. With a ‘go ahead’ gesture from Qhila, he looked at his texts while she went to get her tablet.

[Grandpa]: Hey John, did you get distracted by a girl along the way?

[Grandpa]: I went to the container and back without seeing you. I’ll do my crosswords, and if I haven’t heard from you by the time I’m done, I’ll ask the staff to help look. Once I do that, I have to tell Brenda too, or she’ll bite my head off.

Yeah that was bad. And also about what John had expected. He had received the texts over half an hour ago, so there was no way his mother hadn’t been told by now and she was going to be furious. Likely, the only reason he wasn’t looking at a half-dozen texts and twice as many missed calls was that he had no reception. Actually, since he had received those two texts at the same time, despite them clearly having been sent at least a few minutes apart, the first barrier hadn’t had any cell reception either. That probably went for barriers in general, inconveniently.

“Sorry, but I’ve got to leave before my mom calls the cops to report me missing or something.”

“Wait!” John had barely finished speaking before he began moving towards the exit, but stopped at Qhila’s request. “One important thing before you leave, that will take 5, maybe 10, minutes. If it is urgent with your kin, contact them first.”

“I’ll head up to get cell reception then.”

“Right.” John had half turned to continue towards the exit but stopped momentarily in puzzlement as Qhila flicked her own forehead. Then she held out her tablet. “Use mine.”

Before John could ask, she anticipated his question and continued, “Abyssal cell network.”

‘I’ll have to get onto that if this barrier business is going to be a thing going forward. Hopefully, it isn’t too expensive,’ John thought to himself as two quick steps brought him back to the beanbag. After a moment of thought, he got started on the text.

[???]: Hi, John here. I am safe, and also terribly sorry for disappearing like I did. I am writing from a borrowed phone, since my own ran out of power. I’m on my way home, and I promise, I’ll explain everything when I get there. Again, sorry for disappearing.

He sent it to both his grandpa and his mom, then handed the tablet back to Qhila. He had explained basically nothing, because he didn’t know what to say, but at least it should calm the worst worries. Hopefully, he’d be able to think of something to say by the time he got home.

“The last thing is to get you an account with the Abyss Auction,” Qhila spoke while doing something on the tablet she’d just gotten back. “It’s one of the few Abyssal businesses that has a website on the mundane internet, which makes it work as a convenient gateway between it and the Abyss Web. The intro package also comes with two upgrade kits to get mundane electronics compatible with Abyssal telecommunications, free of charge.”

“Nice,” John commented as he received the tablet back, now with an extremely generic-looking signup page displayed.

“Not really. They run the biggest and most convenient online marketplace in the Abyss and they’re the biggest service provider for the Abyss Web. Getting people on and used to using them is good for business.”

“Oh,” So magic Amazon, then. That was still pretty neat, but it was probably smart not to assume selfless intentions. That said, he still set about filling out the form.

“Look, you’re in a hurry to get back to your kin, and if I’ve got the right read on you, keeping them from stumbling into the Abyss is important.” At this point, the unbidden thought of what would happen if his mom ran into a rat ogre popped up. He quickly shoved that aside to return his focus to Qhila and the form. “So we don’t have time to get you up to speed on the stealthier way to go about things, but you being able to get some bearings on the Abyss immediately is important. And doing it by way of the internet is a lot safer than poking your nose into random barriers.”

John finished the signup form, after which it asked him to place his hand on the screen to read his mana signature. He did so while Qhila continued, “You should still keep your wits about you, though. Malicious technomancers can do a lot worse to you than…. whatever their mundane equivalent is called.”

“Hackers, I think,” John offered, while the screen changed to show a checkmark. It then asked where and when he wanted his intro package delivered.

“The Auction itself has a pristine reputation, but they also have the money, power and incentive to cover up any issues. Using it should be safe, but just in case, I would suggest not ordering delivery to your home. The park is a good place for mundane-passing people. It’s easy to disappear into the crowd of mundanes if you need to but there are still many secluded places for the drone to teleport in unnoticed, and there are 4 Alleys going by so it doesn’t narrow down where you came from or are going much more than ‘somewhere in Springfield’.”

John had been on the way to fill out his address but quietly went back and changed that to the park, and the desired delivery time to when he expected to get back there by the Alleys. And with that, the signup process was complete. There was a message about a discount on his first order as well, but he figured he could look at that later.

For now, he handed the tablet back to Qhila, said goodbye, and started heading for the delivery, and then home.