Born a Monster

Chapter 27: Born A Monster, Chapter 27 – Twenty Gold

Born A Monster

Chapter 27

Twenty Gold

Twenty gold, or two hundred silver, or two thousand copper, or twenty thousand tin.

At a rate of one tin per day, that is twenty thousand days. With each year being 365 days, some 55 years to earn my debt off.

Or, coming from the other way, twenty thousand tin in six years is just under a copper a day.

Well, I’d found ways to make that sort of thing work with biomass, just not to that degree.

.....

Speaking of biomass, I could BUY FOOD. Oh, the things I wanted to eat. And the volume, and... Anyway, I really could. Those second tier organs and muscles and skin and scales?

In theory, I could BUY THEM. With coin. I’d be eating myself into longer indenture, but ...

Longer than fifty-five years? Well, okay, I had a couple of millennia before my body aged a year. But how long did Kismet have?

How long until the Guild collapsed? Until some monsters decided to destroy the humans of Narrow Valley, the way they had destroyed the goblins near Seacrest? If I were a goblin, that’s what I’d want to do.

Okay, breathe.

The goblins were far away. The humans weren’t trying to kill each other. Or maybe they were. The more I heard about taxation and other treatment of the vassal villages, the more doubts I had.

There were still three highly competent adventurers who thought of Narrow Valley as home.

The Guild of Guardsmen, Porters, Drovers, and Linkboys lived off contracts, and there didn’t seem to be any shortage of work.

So, in theory, if I improved my earning potential, I could live here. Or, if I wanted to spend eternity in debt to the Guild, I could live here.

Eternity of service? Long time, no thanks.

Okay, so what could I do to improve my earning potential? Collecting herbs had made good money – if we were far enough away from any civilization.

I could cook – if I had access to an oven, and firewood (which I could make on my own), and ingredients. Plus I could eat the excess at the end of the day. But the Guild didn’t allow use of its facilities for personal profit.

One would think I could just be a valet, using my Manservant class to gain employment with a bonded landowner. Well – no. Dedicated valets had three or four levels of Manservant, and hundreds of points in ability unlocks.

In anything someone wanted, they would be better at it than I was. My total divisor was ridiculous, basically stunting my growth. I couldn’t even calculate where I’d be if I weren’t spread so thin.

But I was. And I was trying to spread myself thinner.

Sigh.

Okay, this wasn’t going to be productive. I let loose of the Lucid Dream, and let the dreams go where they wanted.

They wanted to force me to experience the pain of a squirrel attack battalion, hurling flaming acorns at me. Thanks, dreams. I needed that.

#

Kismet shook me awake.

“What? It’s still dark.”

“Either I’m eating cookies, or I’m eating you. Your choice.”

“Hrmmm... Okay, I’ll wake up.”

“C’mon. Faster.”

We dressed, and rushed off to the kitchens. Madra was there.

“We want to help cook!” exclaimed Kismet.

“Well... check those eggs over there. You crack it on the edge of a mug, like so.” She cracked the egg one handed. “Put it into a mug. Now, make sure there’s no chick or eggshell in it. Once you’re sure of that, dump it into a bowl, like so. Intact yolks into this bowl, broken yolks into that one.”

“Oh, and don’t throw those eggshells away. We wash those and crush them, infusing them with each step.”

We had a surprising ratio of whole yolks to broken. Whomever had picked the eggs had done well. Only one was rotten, and only two had unborn chicks in them.

“Hey, can I eat these?”

“Not as they are. I chop them up very fine and use them as ingredients in meat pies.”

“Yum!”

“Ick.” Kismet made a face like she had salted a slice of lemon.

Flipping the eggs and bacon was a job that Madra kept for herself, but Kismet and I got to mix the dough for biscuits, even if Madra’s senior assistant Kestios got to roll and cut them.

We melted the butter, and Kestios applied it. A very light coating on the top of each biscuit.

A single serving of milk, watered to look like three, and a single slice of toast. There were too many ingredients and meals to infuse them all, but we did what we could.

“And now,” Madra said, “we clean the cookware.”

Kismet blinked. “We don’t eat our meals while they’re hot?”

“We’re trying to get to the food bits before they set.”

“Oh. Well, I guess-”

The dirty dishes and utensils started coming in before we finished with the cookware. We ate our meals cold, and began to chop vegetables for the lunch salad.

“You’re not getting paid for that.” Cosimo said, passing by.

“Is there paid work?”

But he was gone.

Lunch was a privilege for the higher paid members of the guild. Not every meal involved meat, but this one had cuts of chicken (which we were not allowed to touch), cheese with rye crackers, cuts of celery and carrots, and some berry I didn’t recognize.

“Hey, how much do we need to make for these meals?” I asked.

“This meal is worth two copper coins.”

Kismet cocked her head to one side. “People pay that much just for a single meal?”

“Infused tier two meal, six servings, four nutrition per serving, divided among five nutrition meters. Should be two and a half copper, but a bunch of folks out there charge less and either don’t infuse everything or sometimes even at all.”

“But – why don’t you run a restaurant?” asked Kismet.

“The Guild takes care of my husband, and guards that fool daughter of mine. If all it takes to ensure that is a few days in a kitchen?” She winked at us. “I’ll endure that. And the coins I earn are just gravy on the steak.”

Dinner was a simple soup, boiled until it was thick like an oatmeal. But it tasted great, even cold.

#

Kismet woke me, thrashing in her nightmares.

I was about to just cast Slumber on her and go back to sleep when I saw him.

Nastyman was right there, inside the room, inside the guild hall, inside their wards that were supposed to keep spirits from entering or leaving. He was crouched by the bed, finger extended as though to stroke Kismet’s forehead.

I wiggled upright, and he stepped back to avoid touching me.

The embarrassed look on his face might have been comical.

I rubbed my eyes, but he was still there.

“Nastyman.”

“Rhishi.”

I had reflected on what to do if this were a conversation rather than a combat.

“Are you bound to her, or are you able to leave?”

“Bound to her?”

“You appear to be a spirit of shadow and nightmare. Are you bound to her, or are you able to leave?”

“Why, dear boy, whyever would I try? Look at her fear. Look at it. More tearful goodness than I would need in a year. The more she fears, the stronger I become.”

I yawned. “You’ll try because you fear me.”

“Oh my. You fool. I don’t fear you. Why should I? Shadow Claws.”

The darkness of the room coalesced about his hands, forming talons of hardened shadows. He slashed at my face, doing six damage past my scales.

Kismet awoke. “Nastyman!”

I stood. “You are only a dream.” His form wavered, but he remained solid.

“That won’t work on me.”

.....

“Won’t it?” I stood. “Strike me again, and let’s see.”

Kismet buried herself under the covers. “Just leave us alone!”

“Ahhh, you think I can’t strike you again, strike you until you are dead?”

I put my feet on the floor, and then rose. He backed off a pace.

“That’s exactly what I think, Nastyman. I think you’re so weak that even the touch of reality drains you. I think I don’t even need to attack you. Just the touch of my palm-”

“Stay back!” he screeched, taking a swipe at my extended arm. The scales broke and peeled back, but I only took four damage. “Shadowy Escape!”

“Lucid Dreaming!” I countered. But the spell just wasn’t designed for that, and he faded into darkness.

I fell to my knees, and then onto my side.

“Rhishi?” Kismet poked her nose out from under the bed covers.

“I’m – I think I’m okay. I’m at half health, but I’m okay.”

“That’s yellow health bar! That is NOT okay.”

I wiped drool from the side of my face, but wasn’t ready to rise just yet. “You didn’t see that? You were right. I’m stronger than he is, and he fears me.”

“But, your face. Your arm – wait, where’s the blood?”

#

Well, the flesh and new scales underneath were pale, as though drained of life. And the damage was real.

But, it seemed that I was subject to something many reptiles do in the springtime – shedding.

The other children made a game of it, seeing how fast they could pull off patches of skin, or how large a piece they could pull off. And when they learned the skin underneath was soft and ticklish – well, children.

The old skin came off easily, and mostly without pain. And the simplest taste –

Kismet smacked me on my snout and grabbed it out of my mouth. “Ew, Rhishi! That’s just gross! No!”

The scales underneath were bright green, and the sunlight almost formed a prism reflecting off of them. There wasn’t even a hint of the dull brown they would fade to.

They didn’t even have time to harden before we had our next contract. Well, I say our, but it was all nine linkboys of the guild, and three untrained whelps.

There were urgent repairs needed to the machicolations for one of the guard towers. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Those are the arrow slits in the floor that allow defenders to attack people close to the wall.

Anyway, the masons needed to pull night shifts as well to complete the contract quickly. They never told us why; military season was generally in the fall, specifically after the week of harvest, when all that raw food had been processed into pastries and the meats salted, smoked, jerked, or otherwise preserved.

There were six of us above and six below; the smallest, such as myself, were up top on the theory that we weighed less and therefore there was less risk to the tower.

I couldn’t SEE Kismet, but the party system let me know roughly where she was.

It let me know when she was knocked off balance, and fell.

She gave off a short scream before she was caught. Hector, nearly half and again her size, had grabbed her and the next ledge down when inertia swept him over the side of the scaffolds as well.

He was a hero, and proud to tell us he’d been named after one (If heroes from another world who never visited Athal counted).

“Thank you.” I told him, when our shift was over.

“You always tell the truth. Would you have saved her?”

“Of course.” I said. “Thank you anyway. What you did took courage.”

“It’s dried now, but I wet myself. What happened was instinct, I didn’t have a plan.”

Kismet rubbed her face on his side. “I still think it was heroic.”

“No, I mean I don’t think I’d do it again, knowing that I could fall, too.”

“You would. I know you would.”

But he didn’t have to. The masons reported their own version of events, where reckless children were playing around on the scaffolds, not taking even their own lives seriously.

Nobody even asked me – adults were assigned to the task, and worked the remaining two nights until it was completed.

But it was spring, the season of fools, and there was no shortage of work.

Hector apparently held a bridge while it was being destroyed, thus saving the city-state which, imported to our world, would give rise to the Itinar Empire. His deeds were spoken of by Flavian, who also brought over the short bladed sword of the same name.