Lee looked at the cube as if it were ready to leap at him from my hands. "Can I see it?" he asked.
I nodded. "Go ahead."
He took it gingerly, as if scared it was going to dissolve into the goo it was made from. After confirming that it was indeed solid and dry—I don't know how but I was pretty sure he was expecting it to be wet and gooey—he took a small lens from a hidden pocket and placed it in front of his glasses.
"Fascinating," he muttered. "A block of almost pure congealed slime."
"He knew that already," Vespera said in my mind. "He knew since the moment he set eyes on it."
"Some sort of detection ability?" Elyra offered.
"I sure hope such abilities aren't common, especially if they allow people to see our statuses," the demon replied.
"The System said our status is mostly hidden, we should be fine," I told them.
"The bond is," Elyra replied. "Not the whole status."
Meanwhile, Lee was done examining the cube. I looked at him. "Interested in working out a deal, then?"
He narrowed his eyes at me. I could see the gears turn in his mind, before his expression relaxed. "Are you asking me, Lee the member of the three-letter club—unofficial and secret, by the way, where we help each other and stuff like that—or are you asking master alchemist Slyzarik's apprentice?"
I met his gaze. "I dunno," I said. I was planning to channel just a little bit of hauler persona but I found it distasteful. That's when I realized that I didn't need to pretend. This was my world now, wasn't it? Therefore, instead of saying who's going to pay me more?, I said: "which of the two would be best to build a long term partnership with?"
Lee's expression thawed. "That would be me," he said with a smile.
"Well then, Lee. What do we have here?"
"This cube is congealed slime of a purity I have never seen before. I can't tell for sure, but it must be beyond 90% at the very least. Ah," he looked at me, realizing that I had no idea what the stuff was for. "You see, congealed slime has a very interesting property that makes it invaluable to alchemists. It absorbs wild magical fluctuations and turns the process of potion making from a disaster waiting to happen to what I would call an almost exact science. Please do not tell master Slyzarik I said that."
"I won't," I promised him.
"Normally, we buy slime cores to produce artificial congealed slime, but this? It is pretty much the only thing those weak cores are good for."
Hence the low price, I thought. And why almost nobody farms them.
Lee continued. "This is much better than cores. I can give you fifty silver for it."
"Come on, don't lowball me," I said, almost lazily. "This little cube here can jumpstart your career and let you break free of your master, can it not? Tell you what. Let's make it sixty and shake hands on a fruitful relationship, shall we?"
He looked at me. I looked at him. Behind me, Vespera crossed her arms and Elyra took a step forward, both of them staring at the wiry man with stern faces, adding their stares to mine. Actually, my stare wasn't stern, it was completely relaxed.
Lee broke eye contact first, chuckling nervously. "Of course," he said. "It is only fair."
We shook on it as promised, and I left with one less cube and a lot more money. Enough to repay my debt to the guild completely, which I promptly did before we set out in search of a nice place to have dinner.
"You were rather mean with Lee," Vespera teased me as we walked.
I felt a burst of outrage bubble up from deep inside me. "Wait, what? I thought I was being nice! I didn't even channel my hauler persona!"
The demon chuckled. How she managed to do so only in our minds, through the bonds, while her face in the real world looked utterly uninterested and bored like that of so many other slaves, I did not know.
"Nice," she parroted. "Sure, extorting favors and good prices from him is real nice. Although I admit, he was testing his potions on us, so maybe you were right."
"Vespera…" Elyra interjected. "Sol is not mean."
"Sure he isn't," the demon smirked. "Are you, spacer boy? Perhaps you don't need to channel your hauler persona anymore. Perhaps you are becoming a ruthless asshole."
She licked her lips. "My ruthless asshole. How hot."
The sheer honey in her voice was enough to make me stumble. That, and the horniness I felt through the bond.
"Even if what you said were true," Elyra said. I felt her timid presence in the bond, growing bolder as she spoke. "Which it is not, by the way. He would be our ruthless asshole, is that clear?"
"Oh my," the demon fawned. "A possessive pet."
The angel growled at her. The demon stuck her tongue out at her for just a moment, mouthing: "cat!"
Meanwhile, I was too distracted to be entertained by their antics. For a moment, the city around me disappeared and all I could think about were Vespera's words. Was I really turning into a ruthless asshole, one who didn't need to pretend and channel a persona to be mean to people anymore?
Perhaps feeling this, Vespera touched my shoulder, and made me face her. "Hey, spacer boy," she said. I could feel that she did not care about being watched. Fuck this city, so what if a slave wasn't supposed to do this? She was going to do it because her Sol was tying himself in knots in his mind.
These were her thoughts and somehow, I could feel all of them. Her red eyes were so deep. Fathomless.
"You are not becoming a bad person, you hear me? I was just teasing you."
I nodded. "Alright."
"You were a bit mean, though," she said with a grin.
I knew she was being playful, so I played along. "Was I really mean?"
"She is right," Elyra said. "A little bit."
I pretended to be taken aback. "Tu quoque?"
She cocked an eyebrow at me. "The fuck did you just say?"
"Elyra!" Vespera shouted in outrage. "Language!"
She cocked the other eyebrow at the demon. "You are the one speaking. You."
"I'd have you know that no foul words ever escape my mouth."
Elyra laughed, and for a moment I got the mental image of a noblewoman in a cheap neuro-stim movie laughing behind her handkerchief to hide her face at a gala, knowing that her moment of mirth was undignified. Except, Elyra was better than any actress. And she, unlike the actresses—real or AI generated—was really here with me.
"Maybe I was a little mean to Lee," I mused. "I'll make it up to him next time. Now that we found our footing in this city, I don't want to be Sol the space hauler. It doesn't suit me."
The demon nodded. The angel took my hand. "That it doesn't, Sol. But I still think you should be mean to mean people."
Vespera laughed. "That goes without saying, little cat."
◈◈◈
Having our guild debt paid off, and Ted's money on top of that, was a very good feeling indeed. One that allowed us to splurge for a nice dinner without thinking too much about it. Were we already getting addicted to a rich person's lifestyle? Maybe.
"It's nice that the matter reclamation skill is turning out to be so useful. Who would have guessed?" Vespera said as she dug into her steak.
Around us, the quiet buzz of the sound cancellation enchantment came from everywhere and nowhere. We weren't in the same restaurant as last time, making me think that places such as this were more common than I initially thought.
"I would have," I said.
She looked up from her plate to stare at me. "Wanna throw hands, spacer boy?"
Elyra was nonplussed, already used to our antics. "Anyway!" She scooted closer to me. "Lucky thing you did not level up when you used it. I do not think the slime cores would have been enough."
Vespera tracked her subtle movement towards me. She was in front of me, with Elyra in the middle, and it was clear that she had taken the angel's quiet approach as a challenge.
"Right…" she said distractedly. "I didn't feel like hunting more slimes either."
"Even if we did," the angel replied. "The slime cores are not a very good energy source."
"And they sell for cheap," the demon said between mouthfuls. I saw her shifting in her seat, and I wondered what she was up to. "They suck all around, don't they? Must be why nobody bothers hunting them."
"Well, we have our [Matter Reclamation]." I argued.
I felt something move under the table, and saw Vespera slowly sink into her seat while pretending to eat normally.
"It is not a cheap ability to use," Elyra argued, completely engrossed in the conversation. "It costs a lot of mana, and it takes time to gather the slime gel. It makes us waste time that might be better spent doing something else."
"Like investigating the hole in the woods! The one with the Skitterpedes!" Vespera said.
She locked eyes with me, and I felt something touch my leg.
I coughed and pretended nothing was wrong.
Beside me, Elyra was utterly unaware that Vespera's foot was crawling all over my leg, steadily going up.
"Come to think of it, we were rather reckless again," the angel said.
"How come?" I asked.
The angel looked at me with her deep brown innocent eyes. "What if you leveled up? We did not have any cores to fuel the skill selection window. Again."
"I hear you," I said.
"Good," Elyra said, beaming. "Then the first thing we are doing tomorrow is find some actual monsters and gather some cores. Then farm for money so you can buy a weapon. Then go back in the Skitterpede hole and explore some more."
"In that order?" I managed to ask, feeling slightly out of breath.
"Of course!" the angel said.
The demon looked at her while sprawled on her chair. "And how do you propose to find suitable monsters to hunt?" she challenged her.
Elyra thought about the question she had been asked. "I am sure Sol knows some tricks. He can talk to people at the guild, can he not?"
"What are you doing?" the angel asked, watching her contort sideways.
"Nothing," the demon said quickly.
I knew full well what she was doing. Her smile turned mischievous. "Hey Elyra, look under the table."
"What—" the angel began. "Silly, both of you. I knew you were going to do something like this ever since I saw you practicing with sticks the other day near the fire."
"I—" the demon began.
"I am not complaining, am I?"