Chapter Twenty-Five - Knee deep in the hoopla

I woke up at six from an insistent buzzing inside my head. Irritated, I tried to find a snooze button, but instead, time-pausing notifications popped up:

🖹

Guild Management Subsystem Bridge activated. You have three guild management tasks pending:

(1) Approve daily quests (Deadline: 8 am local time)

(2) Approve outstanding expenditures

(3) Approve planned guild extensions

Tasks can be completed from any physical guild management terminal.

🖹

You have acquired 1 DNA sample. Please select:

(1) Initiate pregnancy

(2) Prepare for third-party impregnation (Not available, no male form available. Acquire a male form to use this option.)

(3) Convert to skill XP for

(3a) Sexual domination (25 XP)

(3b) Sexual energy absorption (5 XP)

(3c) Sexual techniques (50 XP)

Sample is viable for 39h28m13s.

Ugh. Why now? The second one was easy; I selected “3c” with no qualms. However, the first one needed me to move my ass to the guild and do so before 8 am. Leaving people without new quests on the quest board would just be unfair, especially if we got a new group as we were expecting.

“What’s up,” Livia asked when I restarted time.

“Stay in bed, I need to schlep my arse to the guild to approve some shit,” I whispered. “I’ll be back in an hour, tops.”

“Bring breakfast.”

“Will do.” I gave her a light kiss after I had slipped out of bed and made sure none of the others were awake. Instead of going through my full morning routine, I just grabbed yesterday’s clothes and sneaked into the living room to dress. I could get cleaned up after I got back.

On my way out the door, I looked at myself in the mirror of the hall stand next to the flat’s main door. Something irritated me in my reflection. It took me a moment, but then I realised I had grabbed my clothes, but not the one pile I had been wearing, but Sam’s. Had I been thinking about how gross swapping panties with her would be? I couldn’t remember when, but I was sure of it. But I already had them on, no sense in wasting time on getting out of them again.

🙚⚜🙘

Neither Greg nor Bill were in yet, but the goon that was on night shift drove me over without complaint. I told him to wait with the car, then opened the backdoor with my code. Inside, everything was quiet, even though the alarm was not activated. Was Kinasteria still here? Did the system even generate a home for her?

I went upstairs, in case she was in the shop area. It was eerily quiet at this time of day, even the slight background murmur from people being in the building complex missing. My computer was as I had left it, aside from a couple of icons blinking for attention on the desktop.

Quests were a simple matter of checking for something unusual, like another one to hunt down Livia and Geri, and then accepting them all in bulk. I wondered why I even had to do that, and on a daily basis nonetheless, but none of the AIs chimed in with an explanation.

The expenditures I had to approve were the upkeep cost for the guild, 1 coin per member and 5 for each officer, Kinasteria’s commission, and the investment in an alchemy lab, level one. I did so but made a mental note to keep an eye on membership upkeep. One coin per day didn’t seem much, but at current levels, we weren’t making nearly enough in guild taxes to cover that.

The guild extension was, as I had expected, the alchemy lab. At level one, it would take one “A-sized” room, whatever that meant. I approved it here, too. In a bigger guild, those two approvals would fall on different people, I guessed.

However, that made another icon beg to be clicked, the “Guild Hall” app I had used yesterday. It now had a new icon, the lab, to drag onto the floorplan. Unsurprisingly, the three upstairs rooms were viable targets. While I dragged it over the plan, the big room above the store presented a note that it needed to be subdivided to accept the lab. Yeah, no chance. I still had matching rooms; why would I cut up a large one?

That finished my tasks, which had taken me all of five minutes, including walking up here slowly. There must be a better way, I thought and dug into the system. After several minutes of discovering what function each app had, I found what I was looking for. Inside a shopping app that held all kinds of objects to be placed in a guild hall, most of them requiring to be placed in a room type we didn’t yet have, I found an unremarkable little item for “just” 100 coins—a mobile remote guild management terminal.

I bought it, and a second later, a tablet matching the other computers appeared on my desk. When I picked it up, it presented the same icons the computer had, just in a phone-like grid. Wonderful! This would be the first and last time I had to get over here in the morning.

I was already halfway to the door when I remembered Kinasteria. I turned around and looked at the left monitor, the one with all the CCTV feeds. I found her quickly, she indeed was on the shop floor, lying on a couch in the nude and reading a book. Why was she reading in the nude? On the other hand, why wouldn’t she? I’ve had plenty of days where I did stuff at home without bothering with clothes, especially after a long day.

But wasn’t the real question why she was here and not at home? She had offered to be on the job 24/7 in the beginning, but I had gone over the official opening hours with her. Thinking back to it, I got the impression she had been looking for an excuse not to go home. Whatever that was, if she stayed here, maybe I could do something for her. I went back into the shopping app to check something I had ignored before. Indeed, there it was—a whole set of bedroom furnishings. All items in there required either a “personal room”, a “rentable room” or a “staff room”.

It took me a couple more moments to order, approve the order, approve the expense, and finally place a staff room in one of the old office rooms downstairs. As I bought an empty one, it was virtually free, just costing me a single coin. I set the access permissions to staff and officers, then furnished it to have a table, two nice chairs, a couple of lockers, a guild console with an entertainment plan and a bunkbed. The latter came without mattresses, so I bought one targeted at humans and one targeted at stone elves.

Lastly, I also bought two food dispensers and placed them in the kitchen, again one for humans and one for stone elves. The description said they would provide up to 3 portions of “acceptable quality” food per day each, which didn’t exactly make them a steal at 70 coins a piece, but in my eyes, it was worth it.

With everything placed, and 317 coins less in the guild account, I went to visit Kinasteria downstairs. I checked my purchases on the way, and they were there, just as I had seen on the CCTV feed—although the feed from the staff room had cut out and been replaced with an “emergency override” button the second I placed the first mattress.

“Morning, Kinasteria,” I greeted her.

“Oh, hey, boss,” she greeted me back with a wide smile. She put her book aside and turned towards me but did nothing to hide her naked body. Without clothes, she looked even more like a child, so it didn’t bother me either. Although, it wouldn’t have bothered me anyway—but I may have found it worth ogling if she had something to ogle at.

“Aren’t you bored here at night? We are closed, aren’t we? I set the opening hours to match the mall, didn’t I?”

“We are, and you did. To be honest, I’m squatting a tiny bit.” Ha! I knew it!

“Oh? Anything I need to know about your home life?”

“Not really. Family mansion, that’s all. With so few stone elves in the area, everyone just expects me to live there. And before this job, it never made sense to move out.” She shrugged. “I want to get away from my family for a while, even if it’s just a couple of days.”

“That’s perfectly fine with me. Feel free to use the staff room and the food dispenser in the kitchen. Oh, and your lab is ready. Tell me if you need materials you can’t order yourself.”

“Staff room? Food dispenser?” She was up and running towards the back at a jiffy.

A couple of seconds later, she was back and jumped at me to hug me. “Thank you, mistress! You’re so kind.”

I put my forearm under her back to support her. Her skin felt slightly rough but in a silky way. “Now, now, it’s nothing. I can’t, with good conscience, employ someone and not even offer them a place to sit.” Or sleep, or eat.

She said nothing else but kissed me. On the mouth. With tongue. I was too perplexed to resist, and pulling away halfway felt rude. She let off after maybe ten seconds, “Sorry, was that too much? I know humans are a bit, how to say, restrictive in sharing things like that?”

I chuckled. “We indeed are. But don’t worry, I’m in a relationship with three girls, and all of us have sex for money with strangers. I can take a little kiss.”

“Huh, so you four are lovers. I thought so, but wasn’t quite sure. Yeah, that’d be scandalous even for stone elves,” she said. “But I like your padding.” She winked, and I laughed, letting her down again.

“So, what are your customs in that regard?” I asked.

“We pair off when we want to have kids,” she explained, “forming life-long partnerships. But having sex, or just kissing and petting, with someone just for the fun of it is normal as, let’s say, having a meal with someone is for humans. Unless we’re trying for fertilised offspring. Then we don’t do that to be sure who the father is.”

“So no issues with unwanted preg…um…fertilisation?”

“Depends on what you call an issue. It sometimes happens that a fertilised larva comes out when we’re asleep and buries itself in; at that point, killing it is frowned upon. But we feel when it’s ready, and usually, that’s when we’re awake and can kill it quite easily. Must be weird for you, not having control over it before it takes hold inside of you.”

“Weird for you, not for us. For me, it’s weird you can so easily kill it off when it’s already clearly a living thing.”

At that moment, my phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at the text.

📱 “Morning, Sam. Everything alright? You haven’t been home for two days, we’re concerned. Please call. Dad.”

Oops. Not my phone.

“Something bad? You look concerned?” Kinasteria asked.

“It’s nothing,” I brushed it off. “I just realised I grabbed the wrong phone when that text made no sense to me.”

“Yeah, I was wondering why you were wearing Sam’s clothes…”

“Those are actually mine; I lent them to her yesterday. Then I grabbed the wrong set earlier when I hurried over to approve the daily quests.”

She chuckled. “I can imagine that confusion. So, you want to hang out more or head back and return that phone?”

“I think I’ll head back if you don’t mind. I promised to pick up breakfast.”

“Fine with me. Gives me a chance to check out the lab.”

🙚⚜🙘

I had…um, I never asked the goon for his name. Anyway, I had him stop at a bakery to pick up a couple of rolls on our way back. The others had already gathered in the living room, fresh and tidy. Only that Sam had put on the clothes I had worn yesterday. Very funny, guys, very funny.

“Breakfast!” I announced and waved the bags, not lowering myself to react to the provocation.

“Oh, hi Sam , is the guild still standing,” Livia asked, hiding her smile behind a hand.

I couldn’t let them get to me. “Fine as ever. I finalised the alchemy lab and added a staff room while I was at it. A little warning: Don’t pull food from the left food dispenser in the kitchen; it may taste a little gravelly.”

“Food dispenser? A system item, I take, Sam ?” Sam asked.

“Yes. Basic sustenance, free to use but limited daily charges. With Kinasteria basically living at the guild, for now, it seemed sensible. I can’t imagine there being a stone elf grocery store at the mall.”

“Anything else, Sam ?” Geri asked, drawing the name out.

I mimed thinking, then said, “No. That’s all, folks.”

“I told you she’d poker-face it,” Sam said. “What’s your acting skill at now, Jane?”

I grinned. “Level six. Not that I needed it for this little charade.” I ripped the bag open and put it on the table. I had splurged for the prepared rolls, going for a selection of ham and cheese. “Nobody here’s vegetarian if I remember our burger session yesterday, or did I miss something?”

“According to my parents, I am,” Sam said and took a big bite. The others also had grabbed rolls, but I had more to say before I could join them.

“Speaking of your parents,” I pulled out the phone and put it on the table in front of her. “Your dad texted. At least reply to tell him you’re still alive so he doesn’t send half the police force after us.”

Sam’s expression soured. “Fuck him,” she mumbled, her mouth still full.

“Only if he pays for it square and fair,” I joked. Sam didn’t laugh. “Honestly, I don’t give a damn about what you think of your family, I haven’t seen my parents for over two years, and that was when I ran into them on the street by accident. But I also don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of coppers waving around missing person posters of you and people mistaking us.”

She sighed. “You’re right.” Then she put her thumb on the phone’s home button to unlock it and slid it over to me.

“It’s your funeral…” I said and picked it up. I was tempted to be vulgar or throw in something we had done, but in the end, that wouldn’t help Sam.

“Got sidetracked by my new girlfriend. All’s fine. Talk next week or so.” 📱

I held it up to Sam before sending it. “Add an ‘s’, ‘girlfriends’, she remarked and went back to looking at her food. I did so and sent the text. Before I could eat half of my own roll, the phone pinged with a reply.

📱 “We talked about this, young lady. You got to think about your career. You get back home right this instance and forget about that lesbian fantasy of yours.”

This time, I didn’t bother with Sam’s approval before replying.

“Remind me, how old am I again?” 📱

The answer was a phone call, not even 15 seconds later. I tapped the red button, sending it right to voicemail. Still, Sam had noticed it and looked haunted, tears welling up in her eyes. Geri gave her a hug, rubbing her shoulder.

“Just ignore it,” she said softly. “We’ve got your back, he can’t hurt you.”

“I know,” Sam sobbed. “He just makes me feel so helpless…”

Something clicked in my mind. “Sam, was he the one?”

She said nothing, just nodded between sobs.

“Say the word, and he’s dead.”

The phone rang again. This time, I didn’t reject the call but grabbed it and walked over to the kitchen. Sam didn’t need to hear that. I hit the green button just as it started ringing for the fourth time, then put it at my ear.

“Huh?” I said to disguise it wasn’t Sam on the phone. I had planned what to say, but on the chance it was her Mother on the other end, I wanted to hear him first.

“What do you think—“ It was him.

“How old was she when you first shoved your dick into her? Five? Ten? Say, how brain-dead are you to expect that to not ever come out? With your kind of job?”

“Who the hell are you? Where is Sam?”

“Sam’s with me, but don’t you turn this around. How about a little truce? I will not get Sam to the nearest police station outside your sphere of influence within the hour, and you will forget you ever had a daughter. You will not try to contact her ever again, not to threaten her, not for any other reason. How does that sound?”

The line was silent but for his breathing on the other end. I gave him a couple of seconds, then added, “Someone will be over to pick up Sam’s stuff tomorrow; let’s make it four pm.”

I counted to three and ended the call. Then I went into the contact list and marked that contact as “blocked”. While I was at it, I also added Livia’s and my contact info. There weren’t many phone numbers I knew without looking them up, just those two and the national emergency number.

For good measure, I also pulled out my system pad and put that man on the guild blacklist. If he ever became a player, he wouldn’t be able to even enter the guild hall. There also was an option to mark him as a guild enemy, which every guild member would be able to see, but that cost coins, so I didn’t bother.