"I might have a problem," she muttered through a gusty sigh.
She couldn't have picked a more fitting place to admit it. Grillby's was nearly empty before the lunch rush, and the morning winter-esque gloom made a soothing contrast to the warmly-colored halo surrounding its barkeep. The fire monster was taking his time cleaning glasses as he tended his only patron at the bar. His 'translator' was mercifully absent, and when she asked, Grillby said Malk had work with his family some days of the week.
"That flying piece of rat shit has an actual family?" she had snarled.
'Malk has a niece and nephew that run a lumber business out in the woods. He's been their caretaker since they were hatchlings, and they're very fond of him. I am, too, so I'd ask you refrain from insulting him until he can be here in person to appreciate it.'
Grillby was an okay guy, she had to admit. His stoic tolerance of his regulars' antics spoke well enough of his character, but he was also well-kempt and generally pleasant (again, in contrast to the regular disarray of his establishment.) He made such an odd bar-couple with the loud, brash and sloppy redbird that she wondered if it was their polar personalities that actually made their dynamic work so long and well.
Complementary spirits, she thought, and that brought her own problem to the fore of her mind with a frown.
'Difficulty with your client?' Grillby hazarded a guess. There was the other thing she liked about him: he was easy to talk to (a must-have quality in a barkeep, she reckoned), and didn't seem bothered by the fact that a stranger from another land could read his words as easily as a close confidant he'd worked with for years.
"Yeah, kinda." The three-day wait had passed, so last night she had another talk with the shady man, and walked away with mixed results.
For one, he said he had successfully extracted the energy harvested by the charm and conducted myriad tests, all with promising results. Actually, he had said 'we' throughout that part of the conversation, leaving her to infer that there were multiple hats in the operation, and she wondered just how many lab rats were scurrying under Hotland's streets.
The other thing was that, having exhausted all that energy on tests...
"Do you think you're able to bring back more?"
"You... want me to do the job again? On the same mark?"
"Are you capable? We'll need as much as that crystal can hold in order to proceed."
"Uh... yeah. Sure."
She walked out of that alley annoyed (nothing new there, although she did get to call him a 'dry-cleaned prolapsed rectum' as a parting shot) and... deep under her skin, a little worried. Everything about this job made her uneasy, and the longer the shady man delayed, the more she wondered whether she was getting played for her time and resources.
And then there was dealing with Sans. Marks coming back to her for repeat business weren't unusual, but those types were predictable and easy to handle. She just wasn't comfortable chasing down a mark more than once, and that guy was... weird—him and his brother both. When she was around them she got a strange feeling, like a worm wriggling in her gut that was so tiny and deep she couldn't scratch the itch. She hated not being able to qualify it.
"I have rules, you know," she caught herself telling Grillby. "They keep my marks happy and me safe. It's good business, damnit."
She had a bunch of rules. She was never inclined to write them all down in any kind of order, and some days she wasn't even sure how many there were, since unique situations came up all the time that forced her to invent new ones. Some days she envied actual prostitutes. Sure, johns could be callous and violent and shitty, and treat hookers like objects, and never mind all the physical risk, parasites and disease, but on the intimate side it was a brutally honest profession—sex was the sole commodity.
Yet, exotic magic... blurred a lot of lines. It was the nature of the beast. If you spend enough time linked to another soul, doing intimate things in even the most detached way possible, there's a chance the mark will start getting funny ideas, because souls can be sticky and sentimental. It was a risk, and the trade-off for not engaging in the act in a more physical way. One of the best tricks to avoid it was to simply not have 'steady' marks at all, and keep moving along, but every once in a while she'd be stuck in a situation similar to this.
That's why she had the rules, to mitigate the damage. Some were odd and many were off-putting, but she knew most of them by heart, and they all amounted to a cardinal rule that was easy to remember—her 'rule number one':
Don't get attached.
Another sigh. "I just have to follow the rules and do the job, and it'll be fine. No mess, no fuss, no fuckin' problem." She rested her arms on the bar and twirled her crystal pendant between her fingers, studying the faint indigo staining her bright lavender charm. If the whole job weren't enough of a bother, she still had a damn riddle to solve: what kind of energy was this, and why was her client so particular about it?
"And another fucking thing! This-" Her head snapped up and she held the crystal pointedly in Grillby's direction. "This makes no goddamn sense. This is a shard from the Crystal of Ji'la. You know what that is? Of course you fuckin' don't, but let me tell you..." She trailed off before she started dumping a ton of magic theory on some hapless barkeep. Talking about how magic worked on her home-world wasn't doing any good here, but... if she learned more about the magic on this world...?
"Actually, you know what? Tell me more about yourself. I'm genuinely curious."
His shoulders slid back and his spectacles slid down, appearing surprised. He then tipped an inquisitive look back to her. 'I'll tell you, if you tell me how we're having this conversation.'
"Heh!" So, he had been curious about that, and merely waited for the right opportunity to press her for information. She liked this guy more by the minute. "I'm an em-reader. It's what my people back home call 'dumb telepathy.' I use it to talk outside my language, but it only works face-to-face. 's how I can understand you, as well as everybody else 'round here."
There was a lilt of alarm in his voice. 'So you read people's minds?'
"No, that's a misconception. I can only read their words. Things you say come from a different part of the brain than things you're only thinking about. It's harder to reach that stuff, and I'm not that good anyway, and in some places it's kind of illegal, you know?"
He nodded, seeming to appreciate the explanation. 'Fair enough. What is it you'd like to know about me?'
"Well the... fire thing... is kind of a huge tip-off. How is it you're made of magic? I mean, with humans..." She tapped the tips of her claws on the counter-top demonstratively. "Human bodies are made of matter, and then they have their soul—it's heart-and-soul, one and the same—and then their aura, a projection of the soul that connects it to the body. Soul and aura, those make the spirit, so spirit magic is anything to do with that. When the body dies, the soul absorbs the aura, and the whole spirit fucks away to... wherever souls go when they die." She offered the topic a blithe hand-wave. "There's a thousand religions on the subject, and I don't give a damn 'bout any of 'em." There was a school of thought from her world that said spirit energy all goes back into the planet, implying that planets have souls of their own, but it all made crystals and magic extremely complicated. She was no theologian.
Grillby spent a few seconds weighing his thoughts. 'I cannot tell you much about humans, except that their souls are more powerful than ours. They use magic in a different way.'
"Right, humans can learn to use material magic, which pulls from matter and the world around them, but they can't be magic. It's not naturally a part of their spirit, and spirit magic is not magic magic. Spirit magic can only interact with spirits. You feel what I'm saying? I get told that monsters here are made of magic, so that magic that's part of you, it's...?"
'Hmm, right. All monsters are born from the dust. Our magic gives the dust its shape and protects our souls. When we die, the magic fades away and we're dust again.'
"Huh, so, your auras are straight-up made of material magic, which can take all kinds of shapes, depending on the element it's drawn from, so... fucking, fire. That's crazy. But, hey—why does monster dust take the shape it does? What makes one into, say, a talking bear, rather than a slime, or a plant with shark teeth, or a fancy-ass suit set on fire?"
'Well...' Grillby pushed up his glasses, mien turning pensive. 'It all depends. Our parents take a lot of care in our conception. Some use their own memories, and some use the dust of their ancestors, so generations live on much the same. Every rare once in a while...' He made a sweeping gesture to indicate himself. 'Something new is born. That's the magic's power, and how unpredictable dust can be.'
It explained the brittle quality and dull grey color of their spirits. Not only was magic in the mix—which she already knew, from asking around and reading Papyrus—but it replaced true spirit energy entirely. The thing about magic, though, was that as bright and powerful as it appeared, it didn't have the vibrant, virile flavor that spirit energy did. To have an aura composed of sheer magic was a radical notion—unless you're a golem (or an elemental, which is really just a class of golem made more of magic than matter.) Her gaze lingered on her charm again. It was a great theory and all, and it explained every monster she met here...
...except for Sans. His reading didn't fit that profile. The magic on him was more like a shell, his aura hidden beneath—and there was spirit energy, because it reacted to hers—so, why...?
She thought of the shady man, and the way he answered her questions. ('You said why. I don't want a monster.')
"Huh. So..." she drawled, pieces of the puzzle slowly coalescing in her head. "If someone could... Why do you think anyone would make a monster that looks like a human skeleton?"
The flame atop Grillby's shoulders dimmed, taken aback. He lowered a look and a voice that suggested she was heading down a slippery path. 'I don't know.'
I wish you did. It might answer the connection between those brothers and my client. She pursed her lips, stymied for the moment, and drew into her thoughts, tapping the crystal charm idly against the bar. Worn against her breast since she was a child, the magic it absorbed and radiated was sometimes all she had to soothe her to sleep—even if it was only the warmth of her own aura.
She looked at it again, testing a breath of her magic, but it was muted by the residue of that strange, blue energy.
When she tried to ask the shady man what it was, he gabbed on and on about bliss, and rage, and sexual energy and how it has the power to draw things out—but the only things he was talking about were emotions. Emotions aren't magic, and they aren't even spirit energy. One can't have an aura made of anger, it's stupid. Emotions are just symptoms of a spirit's condition—that's why you FEEL them rather than become them. You can't shove that shit in a bottle—'canned emotion' isn't a thing.
...But... what if it was? What if some smartass found out a way to...?
The crystal in her hand felt very cold.
"Holy shit," she breathed. "I think I just figured something out."
She needed to talk to—no, that wouldn't work. Sans was a prevaricating little shit, and probably wouldn't admit anything about it. She knew someone else who might, though.
"Hey." Her focus alighted on the barkeep. Grillby was emitting a wave of curious trepidation in her direction, but didn't ask until she spoke, first. "Where can I find Papyrus?"
'I'll admit I'm afraid to tell you. What are you scheming?'
She bit down a saccharine grin. "Grillby, my new friend, 'scheming' is a really strong word. Can't I simply have a plan? That's a lot more innocent. Besides, it'll be more beneficial than you know, to everyone involved."
He cast an uncertain look around the bar before answering, 'Try the road south of town. He has that route set aside to work on puzzles.'
"Puzzles? Like, dumbass word searches or what?"
'No, the kind meant to thwart invaders. It's part of our defense system. It's... questionably effective.'
"Huh. Guess I better put on my damn thinking cap and go find him, then." She shuffled down from her bar stool and reached for her cloak.
Grillby tapped one finger on the bar, snagging her attention, and then leaned forward. The flames around his spectacles darkened gravely, and the dip in his tone was significant. 'If one of them gets hurt... and I find out it's because of you, you will not like what happens.'
The only person getting hurt around here lately is me, she thought bitterly. However, there was no question whom was being discussed, and she wasn't looking to see what a fire elemental could do when outraged, so she carefully said, "Ah... noted," and left.
