Chapter Forty Six - The Value of Money

Once outside the jail, I opened my interface, focusing on the notifications I’d ignored earlier. There were still a lot of incoming messages. But the notifications were separate from them. I opened the list and found one of them was a message from Miss Tutorial! I pressed it and she appeared as usual.

“Heya there, Gell! I see you’re about to take an… well. It looks like you already took an item. Want to learn about thievery and the consequences (and benefits!) of being a huge thief?”

“Uhm, yes please?” I asked, shuffling my feet in embarrassment. “Sorry for ignoring you earlier…”

Perhaps I should’ve listened to her message before I picked up that pie… It had been worth it though. I was half tempted to go steal another one but unfortunately, the area I was in no longer looked anything like where the bakery had been and I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to it without asking for directions.

Miss Tutorial giggled like she did sometimes.

“Well. Thievery is a big aspect of Tread the Sky! You can steal from NPCs and players alike, though you can’t steal soulbound items, or items you’re using. That said, things can be stolen from you just as easily! You have to always be wary of someone trying to steal from you if you’re carrying around valuable items, so it's best to store your most precious possessions in your room at the Adventurer’s guild, or a bank!”

‘Ohhh,” I thought, in sudden comprehension. “So that’s what the big treasure chest with nothing in it in the Adventurer’s Guild room was. Wait a minute… didn’t my Steal ability specifically say that I could steal soulbound items?”

I checked my special abilities once again. Sure enough my Steal special ability had that little qualifier of ‘epic class’ with the description telling me I could steal soulbound items. Perhaps that wasn’t normal.

Fortunately, I wasn’t very worried about people stealing from me. Since apparently things being worn couldn’t be stolen I figured I was pretty safe. I already wore all of my most precious items: my tunic for reminding me of bugbear, and my seashell pauldrons for reminding me of what I should never sink to.

It would suck if someone stole my glove or my circlet, but I didn’t actually have much use for either item. Now that I knew I could get funds which could be traded for food I was planning to sell them soon.

“Potions, spellbooks, unused or unidentified weapons and armor, your coins, and any equipment that isn’t Soulbound are all at risk of being stolen, and cities are rife with thieves! The more people around, the more likely it is one of them might take a peek into your bag,” Tutorial continued her lesson, showing me pictures of crowds within a city image from above.

“Do you tell everyone this? Because, I appreciate it. It’s nice to know everyone thinks their Soulbound items are unstealable!”

My own tunic and pauldrons were the only items I owned that were Soulbound.

“If you catch a thief in the act, you can call the guards by shouting for them, at which point they’ll no longer be able to steal anything and be forced to flee! If they steal from you in the wilderness though, you’re out of luck unless you can kill the thief before they get away! The reverse is obviously true if you’re the one trying to steal something! So go crazy! Hover outside dungeons and take the hard-earned spoils of suckers! Your life as a master thief awaits! If you’re caught though, you’ll have to pay double the value of the item you stole, or serve time in the local jail! Would you like to learn more about going to jail?”

“Nooo, please!” I whined, running my hands fretfully through my hair tendrils and trying to wrap my head around everything she’d told me. Were Miss Tutorial’s lessons getting more complex or was that just me? This hadn’t seemed nearly so complicated when I’d snatched Red Thorn’s dagger or Half Bold’s horn.

Then again, I remembered skipping her lesson on bounties because there had been pages and pages of text, so maybe this was just one of the more dense lessons. Besides, it all sounded useful to know.

“Alrighty adventurer! You know where to find me!” Miss Tutorial proclaimed before disappearing and leaving me staring at another part of the outer city of Variak once again.

“Bye, Miss Tutorial!” I exclaimed happily.

So, it seemed I could get money by selling items or stealing it. I could also sell stolen items, or create items with a profession. I could also obtain items by… by killing what invaders thought of as monsters.

I would never do that. That left the first two options.

I flounced up to the nearest guard, a man named Kyle, the Guard, and asked him, “Excuse me? How do I become a Builder?”

I loved the buildings in the city, and the idea of creating my own city appealed to me. It would be huge and all of the buildings would allow the occupants to see the Great-Open high above! There would be no dungeons there.

‘Yeah…’ I thought dreamily. ‘My metropolis. And any of my kin could come and go however they chose… Adventures could come, but only if they swore not to hurt the Kin.’

I hated that there was no good name for the creatures of this world. Invaders always called them monsters. Beasts. Mobs. All unflattering. I decided then and there that from now on monsters of all kinds would be the Kin. I would make the adventurers use it too. Yeah…

‘And if they call us Monsters then I’ll just have my Kin guards throw them out of my city…!’

The same neon beam from before appeared again as I finished asking the guard my questions, guiding me to my destination. I walked through the streets of the city, greeting everyone I saw. My messages kept piling up, almost all of them some variation of “How did you get that race?” or “Epic costume!” which I still didn’t really understand.

The NPCs… the Instinct’s slaves, greeted me warmly, while the players seemed perfectly happy to contact me via my messages instead of acknowledging me physically. Most of them were constantly going places or doing things, and usually only had a few moments to spare to stop and gawk at me before getting back to their thing.

In almost no time at all I was standing in front of a large workshop that had smoke piling out of a chimney at the top. Planks, metal bits, and timbers lay scattered about everywhere for a ten yard radius around the building, contained only by a small rickety fence that seemed surprisingly weathered and worn for a fixture of a builder’s guild.

I stepped inside and was greeted by a veritable hoard of adventurers, all of them surrounding one man who didn’t actually seem to be saying anything to any of them. For that matter, none of them were saying anything either. The man was a tall orc, his customary lower fangs creating an underbite that looked more cute than threatening, since he was dressed in a rumpled white shirt and dirty trousers.

The inside of the building was large and there were a lot of people tinkering with things. Laying bricks, or mixing strange and unsavory looking brown poridges, which I assumed would become more bricks. The whole place smelled of dirt and sand but there were tables strewn about the place that no one seemed interested in sitting in.

A little intimidated by the crowd around him, I approached the counter on the side where a significantly less popular girl was standing and waiting. She was a human, but that hardly mattered since she and the man were both clearly NPCs.

“Hello, Nadia Venks,” I said, reading her name above her head. “I’d like to become a Builder?”

“Ohh! A new builder to be are we? That’s grea–!”

“Yeah yeah, I’m sure the Instinct has a whole speech prepared for you. Skip ahead to the part where I can start building things for money, please! I want a pie!”

To my surprise, the NPC abruptly aborted her pre-planned speech. Several NPC Boxes with text appeared and disappeared too fast for me to comprehend before the box stopped on a selection request. “Get Started as a Builder! Initial Membership fee and your first hammer!”

“Pay 1 silver,” was greyed out next to another option that read “Not Right Now.”

Focusing on the greyed out text I growled. “What the hell! So I can’t make money because I don’t have enough money to start making money!? This is so stupid! Will someone give me some of these stupid coins?”

To my shock, quite a few of the crowd around the front desk turned to look at me. One, a particularly large man named Brawnwhen_123 beamed at me happily.

“Hey there girl. You need some startup money?” he said.

“If start up money is 1 silver then yes! I do!” I said. Part of me was tempted to ask him if he would just buy me a pie from the bakery, but I realized now that I had to learn this. Learn to make these funds for myself because who knew if I could trust the next player I met?

‘Amy and Iron… are they really my friends? Amy healed me… Iron fought Red Thorn. But why did they call her…?’

I rose from my internal thoughts to hear the adventurers around me arguing about… something.

“Dude, that’s probably not even a girl,” said another player, a halfling by the name of Roguesalot Alot.

“Doubt it. I’ve tried playing as a girl. I like to play girls in other MMO’s but it's… weird in this one. Too real. Creepy. I bet she’s a real girl.” Brawnwhen said, folding his arms across his chest self assuredly.

“Hey? Uhm. Gell? Are you a real girl?” Roguesalot asked, almost tentatively.

I blinked at the barrage of questions from three or four different avatars. Was I a real girl?

“I’m uh… I’m a real Jellyfae…?” I replied, unsure if I’d said the right thing. “Look, you guys, I want to become a builder but I apparently need 1 silver to become one. Can you help me?”

“I can help with that,” came a sudden voice behind me that I’d never heard before.

I turned along with a few of the people around me and spotted a man standing at the door who looked… very unusual. He wore a pair of blue pants that seemed somehow white at the same time. The looked comfortable but also like they wouldn’t block a fingerpoke, let alone a sword swing.

His shirt was just as strange. Blue and smooth fabric that contoured to his flimsy looking body. He wore two little windows on his eyes, shelved there by a frame that wrapped around his nose and ears. Glasses, I realized. All and all, he somehow looked incredibly out of place.

In his hand, he held a cup of some sort of steaming liquid christened “Saint Joe.”

It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t the only person staring at him. As I watched, conversations stopped and the room went a little quiet.

“Holy shit,” someone almost whispered, but it was loud enough that I could hear it on the other side of the room. “That’s Francis Delaney.”