by Sarah Lin
"That was pretty good." Wemilat came up beside him and smiled encouragingly. "Okay, dismiss the cage. You can actually keep that one - no charge so long as you bring it back undamaged."
"Thanks." Rick disabled the device and stood up, while beneath them the squirrel ran around their feet. "Will this thing be strong enough to capture something serious? I mean, not an aura bear, but a dragon or something that uses heavier lucrim."
"Well, no cage is unbreakable." Wemilat gave a lazy shrug. "If it's a well-fed dragon, you're going to have a hard time catching it in the first place. If it's something really serious, you'd probably want tranquilizing techniques, not just a little trick like this. But it'll do in case you run into something average."
"Then I'll keep that in mind. Hopefully if I run into any other endangered animals, I can bring them back here."
"You're a good man, Rick. Hopefully we can talk some sense into Uncle Delsin. Actually, if you didn't already work for the CSLA, I'd almost consider hiring you on a part time basis."
That surprised Rick, far from anything he'd considered. He'd chatted with the siblings a few times, but he wouldn't have even called them friends, much less on a familiar enough basis for a job offer. Then again, they didn't seem to get the chance to work with many people.
Before he could figure out what he wanted to say, Adsila came in from the other room. The squirrel ran up to her leg and she immediately kicked, not connecting hard with the animal but sending it sliding across the room. Wemilat scowled at her, but she just focused on Rick.
"Okay, I have it ready for you. Come into the main room."
If she meant she was done with the jackalopes, that might be an even better gift than the cage. Rick eagerly followed her to the front desk, where Adsila triumphantly raised a stoppered test tube of red liquid.
"Tadah!"
"Uh..." He stared at it. "Is that jackalope blood?"
"Of course not!" She looked dismayed for a moment, but only a moment. "No, this is an extremely concentrated extract of their twisted lucrim. Filtered through their biology, it's like a highly specialized core. Definitely not something you'd want to just drink, but it's valuable."
"That's brutal," Wemilat said as he came up beside them. "Even jackalopes deserve better than that."
"Oh, hush. Extracts fund more of our operations than your nonsense." Adsila turned back to Rick with a smile and pushed the test tube into his hand. "As the person who brought in all those bodies, this is yours. If you don't know what to do with it, feel free to talk to someone who does. Just don't sell it off randomly - that'd just be rude."
Rick accepted it and smiled back. "Great, thanks. I think I might know someone."
"But that pales in comparison to the far greater gift!" Adsila reached behind the counter and then pulled something out with a flourish: a jackalope stuffed and mounted on a plaque. It looked a bit ridiculous with its mouth open, but that was kind of the point. "Whatever your joke is, I hope it's funny."
"Heh, I think it will be." He took the plaque carefully, imagining how Melissa would react. "Thanks to both of you. If your uncle doesn't kick me out after I find the last anomaly, maybe I'll stop by more in the future."
They left on a good note, leaving him cheerful as he began biking back into Branton. Despite the lack of progress in some ways, it had been a good day. He was closer to his goal, Delsin might actually agree to train him, he had the stuffed jackalope for Melissa, and the surprise vial of extract.
There was likely only one thing to do with it: give it to Lisa... oh shit, Lisa. Rick's eyes went wide and he slowed down as he tried to get out his phone while still biking. With all of the distractions, he'd lost track of time. He wasn't late to their meeting in Eastpark, but he was damn close. Worse, there weren't any buses or taxis out here, so he didn't have that option.
Rick exhausted himself biking as hard as he could, then grabbed a taxi at the first opportunity. He still ended up reaching the park almost ten minutes late. Fortunately, Lisa waited with a calm expression on her face, apparently going through her meditations. When he arrived, however, she looked at him with concern.
"Is everything okay, Rick?"
"Sorry I'm late, but I hope this will be worth it." He pulled the test tube from the place he'd secured it and showed it to her. "This is apparently jackalope extract. I have no idea what to do with it, but when they talked about its properties, I immediately thought of you. Think you can do something with it?"
"Thank you, Rick." Lisa gave him a surprisingly broad smile and took the test tube from him, brushing his hand. "I don't know anything about this specifically, but extracts like these are commonly used in higher end mixtures. This could be just what I need to produce better ones... actually, this is too nice of a gift. It'd be more fair to compensate you in some way."
"Nah, don't worry about it. Not with you giving me so many free mixtures. If you really feel guilty we can just do more training sessions, right?"
"That's kind of you." She watched him fondly, then seemed distracted for a moment. Glancing down at her phone, she then looked back up at him. "Can we reschedule our next session? I'm actually going to be attending a seminar on lucrim massage - it'll be interesting, but it will eat up my week. Can you do Saturday?"
"Not Saturday, I have a da-" Rick cut off, realizing that he'd been about to mention his next date with Emily and shying away from it without quite knowing why. Lisa shot him a curious glance.
"What was that?"
Part of him wanted to just say that Sunday would work better, but why? They were adults and there was nothing shameful about it - if anything, he should be proud. "Uh, I have a date with Emily on Saturday. I hadn't mentioned it to you yet. We've both been busy."
"Ah. Okay." Lisa turned away rather abruptly and Rick immediately felt a bit guilty without being certain why. The way she was turned he couldn't see her face, but her posture was stiff. "Thanks a lot for the extract, Rick. You're a good friend."
"Of course. Is... everything okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." She turned back to him with a smile. "And it's cool that you're dating Emily. She'll be able to watch your back when things get rough."
He laughed awkwardly. "Yeah, if she doesn't drag me into anything worse."
"Before I forget, let me give you these." Lisa turned to open up her backpack and handed him a small case that appeared to contain several cans. "These are my newest mixtures, and I think you'll like them. I've been putting a lot of effort into translating the data into results lately, so I hope you'll see the positive effect."
"Great, thanks."
"Does Sunday work for you for our next sparring session?"
"Yeah, it should." Rick tapped it into his phone, eyeing Lisa suspiciously. "Is everything alright? You're talking like we're not going to spar today."
"It won't work today - I need to get ready for the seminar. But I wanted to get you these, and thanks again for the extract. I'll see you on Sunday, alright?" Lisa gave him a broad smile and moved away, leaving Rick a bit stunned.
Obviously she wasn't happy, but he wasn't sure why. The one potential answer that occurred to him was that she was upset that he was dating Emily, but that made him feel arrogant and self-centered. It was possible that she had her own issues in life to deal with. Given how they'd both been busy with work lately, they hadn't had much chance to talk.
After standing in the park for a while, directionless, Rick turned back and headed home.
Chapter 28: Drifting Time
Delivering the stuffed jackalope to Melissa began one of the happiest periods of Rick's life. She laughed hysterically when she saw the jackalope, remembering when he'd pretended that he didn't get it and finding it just as funny as he'd hoped. For the next week she kept setting it in different positions around the house, putting objects in its jaws or taping things to its paws. Seeing her delight in the stupid present put him in an excellent mood.
The rest of his life was flowing smoothly too, in a way it almost never ha
d since he'd realized that he couldn't rely on his parents. Though he still hadn't managed to crack the top ten in the rankings, he was doing quite well at work. The normal paychecks alone were far more money than he was used to getting, and when he got a bonus of almost 20,000 lucrim it just seemed insane.
Overall he felt ridiculously rich, even though he knew that wasn't true. Compared to his extended family, he was certainly swimming in cash. Unfortunately, Uncle Alan and some others heard he was doing well and tried to beg money off him, but he managed to put them off.
No, nearly all of that money went straight into the bank or into his own development. He kept biking everywhere, eating cheaply, and not wasting anything. Once or twice he and Melissa ate from their favorite Chinese place, though now that he was drawing a normal salary he realized how cheap it really was. But it was good, and they enjoyed it, and that was the only value that mattered to him.
So far he'd managed to collect over 35,000 lucrim in the bank. That seemed like a ludicrous amount of money to just have sitting there, but it was still far short of the 100,000 he'd need for a fighter deposit on an apartment. It irritated him not to invest that money back into his own strength, but he told himself that this was part of growing up. Allegedly some paths required their acolytes to leave tens of thousands of lucrim in unused generation rate just sitting in a lucrim mass until the proper moment.
Still, eventually he hoped it would come together. He could move into a better apartment and not tell anyone in his extended family except Uncle Frank. Then he could stay focused on his work and start investing his salary back into himself. Maybe he'd even convince Delsin to train him and he'd learn something useful.
Dating Emily proved much less stressful than he'd feared. She had a spiky outer shell, but as she grew comfortable with him, the spines weren't directed toward him so much. The relationship wasn't terribly intimate, but it was comfortable. Once when they watched a movie at her place, he'd been anxious that she was propositioning him, but Emily just fell asleep lying against his side. The ease she felt with him and the soft presence of her sleeping against him were incredibly satisfying.
There hadn't been anything interesting at work, so she hadn't gone with him, but for a few of their dates they sparred together. She was all burning intensity there and he welcomed the chance to test his defensive core against her aura blades. At full strength they'd deal serious injuries, but he could endure a weakened version and he was getting tougher.
Delsin's advice about his foundation proved to be correct: all his biking had been strengthening his foundation. It had been a while since he'd done the Buffet's Buffer exercise, since his core had been cut to the bone, but now he had new lucrim gains to harvest. He resisted the urge to invest them and instead set them aside in a separate mass, just in case Delsin changed his mind.
He didn't see the old man so frequently anymore, since they'd finally found and eliminated the last of the lucrim anomalies in the Peakless Wildlife Refuge. The anomaly Delsin showed him in return was extremely vague, not much better than surveying randomly. It seemed like the old man knew it and chewed on the debt between them irritably.
Mostly Rick's work was boring, but he'd gotten better at meditating while doing the survey technique. Between that and all the biking, his daily shifts were also workouts, leaving his other hours more free than before. That time was quickly absorbed by Emily and Melissa, but that wasn't a problem - what was the point of saving time, if not to spend it with people he cared about?
On one occasion he'd stumbled across a small warren of jackalopes and expected a fight, but there weren't many. He let them attack him for a while, hoping that his defensive core had grown enough to ignore their antlers. All he got out of it was a lot of cuts, a bit of humility... and a bit more growth of his defensive core.
Once while surveying for an anomaly he ran across a coyote with a broken leg. He didn't think that it was a lucrim-using creature at all, just a normal animal, but he still used the cage to capture it. Back at the Refuge, Wemilat confirmed that it was just a normal coyote, but said that he could nurse it back to health.
That time he did run into Delsin again, the old man just grunting something about improving his foundation and gathering more lucrim. It almost sounded like he was coming around to training him, but Rick didn't want to press his luck.
Unfortunately, not everything was positive. Sparring with Lisa had become strange. She was still friendly, yet space had grown between them. Once they had spent less time talking about details of technique and wandered into personal topics, yet now she kept things far more professional. Though she was still his favorite client, the sessions always left a bad taste in his mouth.
He realized with a mild sense of irony that starting dating had actually made his life a lot more technically focused. When he was with Emily they talked about lucrim a lot of the time, and now that Lisa was focusing on skill and Melissa was preparing for her exams, every part of his life was consumed by it. Though he didn't mind, he did think about it more often than he expected.
In any case, he couldn't doubt that Lisa continued supporting him, and he did his best to support her with all her mixture experiments. He had Melissa join in with some of them, plus he got Emily to give him another can of the EthCorp Bioenergetic Restorative. Though Lisa thanked him, she was much more reserved after that and he wished that he hadn't done it.
She was getting better, though, her mixtures providing more of a boost. Combined with his new salary, he was growing faster than he expected. Not explosively, and nothing compared to a Birthright Core, but he enjoyed it.
Would it be enough, just to enjoy growing and spending time with people he cared about? Was that a full life? It was certainly more than most people in Rick's family had, yet he wasn't sure. For so much of his life he'd been scrambling just to get by, so having options was strange. The more people he met, the more he got the sense that almost everyone was just struggling to get by. Fighters most of all, driven by a world of endless competition and little thought.
Other than quotas at work, where he was well ahead of the minimums, there was only one major deadline in his life: Melissa's CLAT examination. As it drew closer he put extra effort into helping her polish her portfolio so that she'd be ready for anything.
As the day drew close and she showed him her portfolio, he felt a real sense of pride:
[Name: Melissa Hunter
Ether Tier: 18th
Ether Score: 203 (preliminary score)
Lucrim Generation: 17,350
Current Lucrim: 17,350]
[Melissa Hunter's Lucrima Portfolio
Foundation: 3500 (Lv II)
Steel Lucore: 5700 (Lv IV)
Combat Core: 4300 (Lv III)
Secondary Combat Core: 3850 (Lv I)
Total Lucrim: 17,350]
His only regret was that he hadn't ever found the time to help her invest her extra lucrim into a truly fitting Lucore. Instead they'd set up a secondary combat core, which was just to put her in peak condition for the CLAT. Afterward it wouldn't be difficult to liquidate it and find a technique more fitting for her. Melissa didn't seem to care, though, just pleased with the rapid growth that came with first gaining a mature lucrima soul.
Hopefully she would keep growing at a faster rate than he had. She wouldn't be trapped working at the House of the Cosmic Fist - where she continued to burn clients when she could get away with it. She wouldn't be stuck on the bottom rung of society with no qualifications. The world was really open to her, especially if she did well on the exams.
In fact, at this stage a tiny amount of lucrim wasn't going to do her any more good, so in their final days, as he saw the tension start to creep in, he made sure to take time to help her relax. They went out to eat ice cream at a place they hadn't since they were kids, he got her a massage with Lisa, and they stayed at home and watched Fist of the Sublime yet again.
One night after Melissa went to bed, Rick pulled up the CSLA page again. It had actua
lly been a while since he'd checked the scoreboard, since his life had just been too full of positive things to care about a list. He was shocked to find that he'd just scraped into the top ten.
[1) Pan Zhou - 194 merits
2) [redacted] - 192 merits
3) Kate Durham - 183 merits
4) Damian - 174 merits
5) Heidi Cunningham - 171 merits
6) Elliot Rutherford III - 164 merits
7) Jack Ganess - 163 merits
8) Machk Bearan - 158 merits
8) Oswaln - 158 merits
10) Rick Hunter - 153 merits]
The next three people were at 150, 147, and 141 merits, though, so he couldn't relax. Or... maybe he could. He was already getting solid bonuses, so was it worth breaking his back just to get slightly higher ones? Rick decided that it would be better to focus on Melissa and help her through the CLAT. He could afford to take some days off work and go with her, just as moral support.
Content, Rick put his phone away and shifted to fall asleep. Just before he did so, his phone beeped a notification. He sat up to get it, since it might be Emily texting something funny before bed. She wasn't an affectionate texter at all, but when she was up late she tended to send him random things.
Instead, he saw a message from the CSLA insisting that he call as soon as possible. Rick stared at it and very nearly put the phone down. Yet after a while, he decided that he couldn't ignore it - the organization was his boss, after all. Instead he padded out the entrance hallway so he wouldn't wake up Melissa with the conversation and stepped out onto the apartment complex walkway.
It was colder outside than he expected. Gritting his teeth, Rick called the indicated number. They picked up on the first ring.
"Thank you for answering." It sounded like the woman who administered things, who he hadn't seen or heard from in some time. "I'm afraid that something has come up and we're going to need to call the top candidates in for some additional work. You'll be compensated accordingly, of course."
"What's wrong?" Rick rubbed his arm holding the phone with the other, trying to ward off the chill outside. "Not something like the reaction you showed us at the beginning, is it? Couldn't you just squash that?"