by Macronomicon
“But not a big one?” Jeb asked, eyeing the fairy.
She shook her head wildly. “Tiny.”
“Fine, the deal continues.”
“Whoo!” Smartass fist-pumped.
“So you gain more power from screwing people over on deals. How? What does that look like?”
“Well, you’ve already seen the stats The System uses. Body, Myst, and Nerve. They are representative of the three kinds of Deals you can make with another creature, and each falls into one of those categories.”
“How so?” Jeb asked, folding his hands over his stomach as he watched Smartass pace back and forth.
“Well, any Deal involving a transfer of tangible goods will give you Body. It is by far the most common Deal.”
“Okay.”
“If you were to trade for information or social power, you would be in the Nerve category.”
“So if I took someone’s…blueprints for a machine, or traded a service for their seat on a council or something? That would give me Nerve?”
“Yes. Well…mostly.”
“What do you mean by ‘mostly’?” Jeb asked.
“It’s far more art than science,” Smartass said. “Every successful Deal will give you a complex mixture of thousands of different tiny improvements throughout your body. The three categories of Body, Myst and Nerve are a simplification created by The System. It could be a little of this, a little of that, it could improve one aspect of your body more than another; there’s really no way to tell.”
“But on average…”
“Yes, on average, that’s what the Deals will do: raise your Body, Myst and Nerve.”
“What about Myst? How do I raise that?”
“If you can convince people to pay you with things that are key to their emotions and identity—such as their appearance, objects that hold great sentimental value, their relationships, or their memories.”
“Acorn got Myst when he took Jessica’s hair, didn’t he?”
Smartass giggled, nodding, and Jeb frowned in thought.
“What if a man’s seat on a council was key to his self-image?” Often, that was the case.
“That’s why this is an art. You would get a mixture of Nerve and Myst, should you convince him to part with it.”
“So let me get this straight,” Jeb said, raising his hands.
“Okay.”
“Your method is outlandishly slower than just killing things and taking their Impact via The System,” Jeb said, ticking off his finger. A person couldn’t go around making bad deals at the same speed someone could go around killing monsters. Not even close. People wouldn’t enter a bad deal unless they were desperate, and you couldn’t even lie to them about it, either.
“It’s got arbitrary rules that force you to adhere to a weird, fae model of behavior,” Jeb said, ticking off another finger.
“And there’s no way to accurately control what kind of power you get when you do successfully manage to enforce one of these bad deals.” Jeb ticked another finger.
“Which people will actively try to get out of paying, obviously.” Jeb ticked the last finger on his hand.
“All true,” Smartass said, kicking her feet off the edge of Jeb’s stone cot.
“What’s the upside here?” Jeb asked.
“First,” Smartass said, copying him by holding up a finger. “You don’t have a choice. You’ve been blacklisted from The System.
“And second, and perhaps more importantly,” she said, ticking off her middle finger at him. “No one, under any circumstances, can take the power you gain in this way from you without your permission, short of killing you. Not even the gods.”
Jeb held his breath, considering the ramifications.
“Sold.” Fuck those guys.
“You know, this is all assuming you survive the year,” Smartass said, kicking her heels again. “You’re not exactly on track for that, given the current circumstances.”
“Blow me.”
“Excuse me?” a keegan deputy asked as he stepped inside the holding cells. “Is my translator working properly, or did you just ask me to perform oral sex on you? What on Pharos is oral sex?”
Open mouth, insert foot. Gotta make something up.
“It’s an—” Jeb choked off a reflexive lie. Smartass gave him a thumbs-up.
“I wasn’t talking to you, deputy, and I apologize for any misunderstanding. I meant no disrespect, and I have the exact amount of respect for you that the situation dictates.”
And not an iota more.
The skull-faced alien scanned the empty room, eyebrows raised.
“Oookay,” he said with a shrug and a headshake. “Humans.”
The deputy unlocked Jeb’s cell and motioned for him to come out. “You’re free to go. You can pick up your shit at Zlesk’s desk.”
Jeb was tempted to ask for a cane or something, but he didn’t want to say a word that might irritate someone who was likely already a bit miffed.
Instead, Jeb leaned on the wall as he hopped his way down to the main lobby, where he saw Zlesk processing paperwork before retiring for the night. The bureaucratic bastard glanced up and waved Jeb over, digging around in his desk for something.
“Jeb, it’s your lucky day. Mr. Grenore is too busy to press charges against you, so the matter’s been dropped. The man owns half the city, so he could’ve had you killed, were he inclined. Count your blessings,” Zlesk said, pulling out Jeb’s pegleg and setting it down on his desk.
“Here’s your prosthetic, your coppers, and your…sharpened spoon,” he said, pushing them forward as Jeb gratefully sat down.
“You’ll just have to fill out this paperwork,” Zlesk continued, pulling out a set of papers and straightening them before setting them in front of Jeb and offering him a battered fountain pen.
Jeb’s stomach twisted as he saw the wriggling nonsense lines stamped across the paper.
“I can’t read this,” Jeb said.
“What do you mean, you can’t read that?” Zlesk asked.
“Just what I said. I can’t read it.”
Zlesk rolled his eyes. “Please. Anyone who learned to read their native tongue can read anything written by a sapient. The System translates your bloated monkey hoots into civilized keegan. Or are you telling me you’ve never learned to read?”
Jeb opened his mouth to tell Zlesk that he’d been blacklisted from The System, but realized that line of inquiry would inevitably lead to why…if Zlesk didn’t outright call him a liar. There was no good solution.
Lie without lying.
“There’s a language center in the human brain that, when damaged, can make it impossible to read,” Jeb said.
“And you’re saying you’ve taken damage to those parts of the brain?”
“I’ve taken some hits there,” Jeb said, slumping his shoulders. He’d bonked his head on the left side a few times with the microwave door. Unlikely to cause brain damage, but the statement itself was true.
“Huh,” Zlesk said, taking the paper away from Jeb and beginning to grill Jeb hard, scribbling on the sheet.
“Name?”
“Jeb Trapper.”
“Class?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Level?”
“I made it to level six before the Tutorial ended.”
“Occupation before Earth was assimilated?”
“Retired from the Army.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Age in Pharos years?”
“I don’t know.”
“Difficulty of your Tutorial?”
“It was easy once I figured out the trick,” Jeb said, leaning back in the chair.
At the end of the questions, Zlesk straightened in his chair, handing the papers back. “Alright, here you go. Sign your name if you can, put your thumb print on it if you can’t.”
“I still can sign my name. That’s a strong connection,” Jeb said, signing his name on the line at the botto
m of the page before handing it back.
“Huh,” Zlesk grunted, glancing between the paper and Jeb.
“What?”
“I guess you can’t read,” Zlesk said.
“What?”
“You just signed an admission of guilt for several high crimes that are punishable by death. Either you can’t read or you’ve got the best Balqua face I’ve ever seen.”
“WHAT!?” Jeb shouted, hopping to his foot.
“Calm down, calm down, don’t get your panties in a twist. I just had to be sure you weren’t messing with me.” Zlesk slowly pulled out a lighter and lit the paper on fire before tossing it into the metal garbage can beside his desk.
None of the other officers seemed to be surprised at Zlesk’s antics, the flaming trash bin earning no more than a curious glance.
“Now I gotta fill out the whole damn incident report.” Zlesk groaned, pulling out another set of papers.
“Oh, and the young girl dropped by earlier today, said you dropped this bulb during the incident.” Zlesk took a gold coin out of his breast pocket and set it down on the table with a clack.
The two of them shared a glance, and Jeb knew that was the closest thing that he was going to get to an admission that Jeb was the one in the right.
“I was gonna say to the Abyss with it and keep it, but I’d feel bad robbing a retard.”
Jeb felt his eyes tearing up, a tiny flame of hope for keeganity fluttering in his heart. The girl had done right by him, and Zlesk... Zlesk had chosen not to screw him over...in a backhanded kind of way.
“You’re not as evil as I thought you were,” Jeb said, wiping the tears away.
“Ugh. Just for that, I’m adding that you’ve got priors as a sex offender,” the keegan said, scribbling on the paper.
“Are we…bantering?”
The keegan raised an eyebrow and flipped the incident report to face Jeb, roughly half the boxes filled out with squiggly, indecipherable lines.
“You tell me.”
Jeb broke into a cold sweat.
***Later***
“So I might be a registered sex offender on an alien planet.” Jeb chuckled, nursing his beer at the bar of the only place in town that served humans. It was a bit run-down, and the clientele were mostly scarred bruisers who could twist Jeb into a pretzel, but it was the only place to get a drink, so here he was.
“You’re not registered as a sex offender,” the grizzled man sitting next to him said, the first words he’d spoken since Jeb sat down and started pouring his heart out to the unflinching bartender.
Closest thing to a therapist in these parts, anyway.
“Why, were you there?” Jeb asked, scowling as he reoriented on the skinny old guy.
“A man who would fuck you over on a whim would have kept the bulb,” the old man said, glancing at Jeb sideways.
Jeb nodded. “Fair point. Hey, why do they call gold coins ‘bulbs’?”
“Why do we call dollars ‘bucks’?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
“There you go. So what are you planning on doing with your newfound windfall?”
“I thought I’d help others with it,” Jeb said, spinning the cup in his hands.
“Oh?” The skinny old man’s brows rose and he turned to fully face Jeb. He crossed his palms and idly tugged on his wedding ring.
“By supporting the local economy. Buy myself a shower, a change of clothes, and a night with a girl with negotiable virtue.”
The old man blinked and heaved a sigh. “That’s it?” he asked. “All you want is a change of clothes and company? You don’t want to start a business, or get a ticket out of here? Move to an all-human village and try to make something of yourself?”
“Pfft.” Jeb waved the man’s nagging off. “In all likelihood, umm…” Jeb snapped his fingers and motioned to the other guy, looking for his name.
“Nixus.”
“In all likelihood, Nixus,” Jeb said, the alcohol forcing him to lean heavily on his elbow to stay straight. “In all likelihood, I’m not gonna live long enough to worry about any of that. I’m a gimp. Worrying about the future is more appropriate for people under the age of thirty with two good legs. My way, the gold goes back into circulation, I get one good day. Everybody benefits.”
“If you only act for selfish motives, I can’t reward you.”
Jeb peered at the guy next to him. “The fuck does that mean?”
“Karma,” the old man said. “I believe good people who do good things because they are right deserve to be recognized. I also think that people who go above and beyond deserve to be honored for it. People like you.”
Jeb peered at the old man, his danger senses tingling, sobering him up in a matter of seconds. “Who the hell are you?”
“Nixus.”
“Who the hell is Nixus?”
“God of reward,” the bartender said, idly cleaning a glass.
When Jeb glanced back, the old man was gone, his stool was empty, and his glass was missing.
All that remained was the wedding ring.
It was thicker than Jeb had thought, almost looking like a coin with a hole punched out of it. The outside bore fascinating geometric shapes, and the inside housed roiling Myst that whirled around a central point like a hurricane.
Welp, that’s weird and magical, Jeb thought, scooping it up into his palm before anyone could see it.
“Hey, did you see a skinny old dude sitting here?” Jeb asked, jerking a thumb at the spot next to him.
The bartender gave him a flat stare.
“Are you giving me that look because the answer’s ‘no’, or because the answer’s ‘yes’?”
“You been talking to yourself all night, buddy,” the melas bartender said, throwing his cloth over his shoulder.
Jeb glanced at the empty spot next to him. “That’s what I thought.”
Jeb glanced to his right, where Smartass was floating in a cup of beer, her arms thrown over the edge like a guy in a hot tub.
She gave a respectable belch, her head lolling on her neck shortly before she slipped under the surface of the foamy brew, a few tiny bubbles all that marked her passing.
Damnit, Jeb thought, plunging his hand into the brew to pull the sopping wet fairy out of the beer, spilling a decent amount of her drink in the process.
The bartender did not look amused.
“Did you catch any of that?” Jeb asked Smartass as he retreated from the bar, leaving a silver coin behind. The fairy was sprawled out on his palm, absolutely shitfaced.
“Any of what?” The tiny fairy lifted her head off Jeb’s palm and glanced around. “Where are we?”
“I think one of the gods who voted for me to live felt bad about giving me the shaft and paid me a visit to even the score.”
“Did she say who she was?” Smartass asked, sitting up.
“Nixus.”
“Oh yeah,” Smartass said, lifting a finger. “That makes sense, because—HURK!”
Smartass rolled over and puked on his thumb.
Unlike what they might show you on kids’ cartoons, fairy vomit was not filled with glitter and rainbows.
It was filled with beer and bile.
“Goddamnit, Smartass,” Jeb said, switching hands and wiping off his palm. “Learn to pace yourself.”
“No…natural tolerance,” Smartass muttered between dry heaves.
“Then don’t drink!” Jeb said, just before bumping shoulders with a melas brute on the way out the door.
Between holding Smartass and his bum leg, Jeb almost lost his balance and took a dive into the street, but he was able to catch himself just before faceplanting. The melas didn’t even spare Jeb a glance as he sauntered into the bar.
The orange-skinned, horned fellow was wearing a patched leather jacket covered in dirt and stains, and his hair and horns were decorated with tiny bones that gave Jeb an almost Mad Max feel. He was obviously high level, and making an issue would be…ill-advised.
&nb
sp; Not fucking with him, Jeb thought, stumbling away.
He had more important things to do… Like jamming his finger into a magic hole and seeing what happened.
Jeb tottered his way to his alley and was about to go in when he paused, realizing that the only thing between him and prying eyes was a pile of trash about four feet high, which would be taken out…
Shit, what day is it?
Jeb glanced around the corner and spotted the R.O.U.S.s snuffling through his blankets, forced to forage more now that the week’s trash had been taken away. The bigass rats looked up as Jeb peeked over, studying him for a moment before dismissing him entirely, far more preoccupied with gnawing open the can of beans he’d been saving for a rainy day.
“Well, shit. Maybe I can get a room.”
Jeb slipped Smartass’s limp body into his new vest and clomped his way to the nearest inn, seventeen silver coins burning a hole in his pocket.
It only took a few minutes and two silver coins before Jeb was seated on his bed at the Starlight Inn, breathing in the scent of raw wood and stucco.
And trying not to mind the crack in the ceiling.
No. Not gonna think about death and roofs falling on us. We are going to focus on the fact that someone or something gave us a weird magic…thing, as a little present.
Jeb discounted the idea that the strange object could be overtly bad. If a powerful being wanted to kill him, there wasn’t much Jeb could do about it. Same with maiming, curses, etc.
Jeb sat and stared at the ring with the swirling hurricane of Myst in the center. He had to assume it was most likely a good thing, because anything else wouldn’t make sense.
Hesitantly, Jeb poked his least favorite finger through the hole. Just the tip at first, but when nothing happened, he got up the gumption to put his whole left pinky through it.
Nothing happened. He couldn’t even feel the Myst interacting with him. Jeb’s finger didn’t interrupt the swirl of Myst, and vice versa.
Hmm….
“Activate,” Jeb said, clenching his fist and pointing at the wall.
“Go!”
“Shoot!”
“Pew, pew, pew!”
Jeb took the ring off, set it on the table and reached into his Myst Core. I hope I don’t have to pay for a new table. Or get sucked into the blender dimension.