I sat there holding that mug of lukewarm green tea, looking like some rich kid from Vila Madalena who'd just discovered meditation after a bad MDMA trip, while the shadows kept creeping closer to my little island of velvet furniture.
The tea had that flat, oily taste of something left on a desk during a twelve-hour shift, but it was the only thing anchoring my brain to reality while the floor kept puking out tall, faceless shapes that smelled like a wet dog and burnt rubber.
I didn't move because my floating sneakers were already costing me enough mana to keep me suspended, and honestly, the thought of standing up to face a bunch of cosmic horrors felt like too much work after everything I'd been through today.
My golden kaleidoscope eyes started spinning with that motorized clicking sound in my skull, the irises reflecting tiny ancient coin symbols as they tried to put a price tag on the towering blobs of ink that were now less than two meters away from my glass table.
The system panel flared up right in my face, appearing with a sharp hiss and a heavy smell of scorched tires that made my nose itch like I was standing behind a broken-down bus on the Marginal.
It was rendered in that absolute trash medieval Comic Sans font that I would have fired any intern for using in a professional presentation, and the letters were flickering in a violent blood-red color that made me want to rub my eyes.
[Value: Incalculable. Origin: Sleeping Entropy.]
Well, that was incredibly helpful, about as helpful as a bank app crashing when you are trying to pay your rent on the due date.
The things didn't have mouths or noses, just horizontal slits where their eyes should have been, glowing with the dim, lazy light of newborn galaxies that looked more like cheap LEDs under a dirty plastic cover.
They didn't feel angry or murderous, but they gave off this heavy, paralyzing hunger that didn't want to chew on my bones or drink my blood like some low-tier monster in a dungeon.
It was more like they were starving for a proper shape, a desperate need for some geometry or definition to save them from being just another pile of random black grease on the floor.
I took another slow sip of my tea, feeling the thick, mana-saturated air coating the back of my throat like a dose of that cherry-flavored cough syrup my mom used to give me when I fake-coughed to get out of school.
Profit was still curled up against my hip on the emerald velvet, his crystal body vibrating with a low, defensive growl that sounded like glass marbles being shaken in a metal can.
I patted his head, my fingers sliding over the cold, sharp edges of his ears, and stared back at the tallest shadow shape with all the boredom I could manage to muster.
I remembered my third boss at the investment firm, a guy with a combover that looked like a dying bird and a habit of clicking his teeth when he was about to lie to a client, and I realized these things had the exact same desperate energy.
They wanted something from me, and the fact that I was currently the only source of pure, unadulterated greed in this entire pocket dimension meant that I held all the cards in this stupid game.
I shifted my weight on the velvet armchair, enjoying the way the high-top sneakers kept me floating exactly five centimeters above the rubber floor.
"Look, I don't know who hired you guys or if you're just spawning here because the rent is cheap, but we need to talk about boundaries and expectations before you get any closer to my chair," I said, my voice flat and annoying in the dead silence.
I rested the mug on the glass table with a small click, leaning back into the velvet and crossing my legs with the kind of performative authority I used to use on suppliers who were late with their deliveries.
"You guys look like you're struggling to keep it together, and I have the energy that can fix that, but I'm not running a charity here for displaced void particles," I continued, tapping the side of my crystal headphones while the sneakers gave a small hum.
"What's the return on investment if I decide to give you guys a stable form? What are you bringing to the table besides this wet dog smell and a complete lack of personal space?"
The tallest blob of ink didn't say anything because it lacked the mechanical equipment to make sounds, but it seemed to consider my words for a long, heavy second while its body wobbled like a pile of half-set jelly on a plate.
It slowly extended a long, oily limb that was supposed to be an arm, trying to imitate the way I was resting my elbow on the armrest of the chair, but the dark matter couldn't hold the tension and simply dissolved into a cloud of greasy smoke.
A sudden wave of raw, desperate frustration slammed into my brain, a telepathic blast that didn't feel like words but more like the specific type of anger you feel when you realize you've been working on the wrong spreadsheet for the last three hours.
It was a dense, heavy emotion that made my eyes water and my stomach do a slow, nauseating flip, and I had to grip the green fabric of the armchair just to keep myself from vomiting my tea all over my floating high-tops.
I could feel their hunger shifting from a general desire for existence to a very specific focus on the golden energy that was pulsing inside my chest like a malfunctioning neon sign.
They were like the kids I used to see at the mall during Black Friday sales, ready to trample anyone who got between them and a discounted television set, except these kids were made of pure entropy and didn't have any skin.
I took a deep breath of the thick air, trying to settle the nausea in my stomach while I stared down the tall blob that was slowly pulling its melted smoke-arm back into its main body.
The realization that I had these things by the non-existent throat made a small, mean smile spread across my face, the kind of expression my ex-fiancé used to call "corporate shark behavior" whenever I managed to negotiate a fifty percent discount on a contract.
I didn't care about being nice or playing the heroic protagonist because being nice in this world was a great way to get yourself killed or worse, exiled back to a place with no air conditioning.
I pulled my hand away from the armrest and brought my index finger up to my mouth, biting down hard on the soft skin near the nail until I broke through the resistance and tasted the heavy, metallic tang of my own blood.
A single drop of hyper-dense, golden-speckled blood formed on the tip of my finger, glowing with the dark weight of the Greed Bloodline that was currently trying to rewrite my DNA into something that no longer belonged to a human.
I held my hand out over the glass table and watched the golden drop fall through the air, heading straight for the pitch-black obsidian rubber of the floor.
The golden drop didn't splash like normal liquid when it hit the floor; it just sank into the black rubber with a quiet sizzle that sounded like a drop of cold water hitting a hot frying pan in a dirty kitchen.
A network of thin, glowing golden veins immediately spread out from the point of impact, branching across the obsidian surface like a glowing root system or a bunch of cracked phone screens reflecting a neon billboard.
The creature let out a low, vibrating hum that I felt more in my molar teeth than in my ears, and it threw itself onto the floor to press its faceless head against the glowing gold.
The other blob monsters followed suit, a chaotic scramble of black grease and glowing slits that reminded me of the time the office coffee machine started leaking and everyone was trying to save their paperwork from the brown puddle.
They were literally sucking the golden energy out of the floor with a series of wet, slurping noises that made my skin crawl and made me regret biting my finger in the first place.
My finger was already healing, the skin closing up with a small, itchy sensation that felt like a mosquito bite that someone had tried to scratch with a dirty fingernail.
I watched them feed, realizing that I had just signed a contract with a bunch of formless horrors using the only currency that actually mattered in this garbage dump of a pocket dimension.
The tall shadow started to change as the gold flowed into its body, the dark matter hardening and becoming more defined until it looked less like a puddle of tar and more like a sketch of a person made by someone who had never seen a person.