The Sleem retreated from it at once, all moving like a single liquid toward the hole in the ground at the center of experimentation. Arcs of lightning chased them, corralled, and forced their movement, punishing any who diverted harshly.

The creature from the rift was focused primarily on the Sleem, but its eyeball made of pure light spun back and looked at our group. The hobbs around me were all silent. Most of them still gripped their weapons, but some had dropped them entirely. A few were on their knees.

Just my luck. More monsters from seemingly nowhere were jumping into my shit. It was jarring and disorienting, like a tornado rising up from the flames of your torched trailer house.

“BE NOT AFRAID!” it demanded of us, shaking the walls and floor. “WE COME TO SPEAK TO THE HOLDER OF THE AFFILI-QWEST!”

Rayna turned and shouted at the rest of us.

“Beholder! Run!”

We all did as she said. I grabbed a hobb on his knees and hauled him to his feet, before shoving him toward the stairs. Tollya did the same with another kneeling hobb and we had them moving.

All of the hobbs sprinted up the stairs, ignoring the residual slime and scattered weaponry. They ran flat out, for their lives. Inspired, I followed. Right up until the point I crashed into a barrier made of electricity, woven over the top of the stairs.

It felt strange more than anything. Didn’t hurt, beyond the small feeling of a minor static discharge. But it physically repelled me, and I flopped to the concrete stairs, trying to catch myself before I fell off the side.

Tollya and the rest of the hobbs had made it through, I had been bringing up the rear with Rayna and we were trapped in the room with the beholder.

Tollya turned back, but she was the only hobb who did. Rayna pressed hard against the electric barrier, but her hands couldn’t get through. She stopped after a few seconds and shook her head at Tollya.

The other hobb took a suddenly shaky breath, and a tear squeezed from her eye before she raised a fist to her chest and solidly thumped it, once. Rayna did the same, then raised her hand to her lips before pressing it to the barrier. Tollya choked, turned, and ran.

I met Rayna’s eyes as she turned to look at me. “I was going to ask how fucked we are.”

The hobb ignored the tears from her own eyes, and I saw her mentally harden.

“Fucked.”

She stood and straightened her back as she began descending the stairs again, keeping a close eye on the beholder. It had turned its attention fully to the Sleem and was shoving all of them from each corner of the room into the elevator shaft at the center.

“Beholders are powerful. Kill at whim. No one controls.” I followed Rayna down the stairs as she spoke. Her words were shorter than before. Sadder. “I just don’t understand why one is here, now. They move through the multiverse, profit and study. Maybe they want Affiliate?”

I hefted my shotgun and nodded at her. “Goddammit. Can’t I ever get a break? Maybe we can kill it. I’ve come out of some crazy shit okay. Kind of a lot, actually.”

Rayna shrugged out of the flame-thrower and picked up a discarded plasma rifle in its place. She checked the magazine, and then primed it. “We cannot kill it. But I want to live, so I’m going to try anyway.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “I want to live too. Maybe we can slip past it. Escape?”

The beholder spun in the distance, but I could feel its attention suddenly turn to us. The map in my helmet told me that the Sleem were all contained. A mass of them was oozing steadily downward, where my drones piped camera footage. They were cramming in together at the bottom, and the sheer volume of slime in the room rose steadily. It had been a lake before, but an ocean was forming.

The mental pressure I felt from the beholder increased, and suddenly I couldn’t remember how to use my new shotgun. There was some kind of mechanism on it that I was supposed to squeeze or push, and I simply could not remember what it was or how it functioned.

The device in my hands became unknown to me, and a growing sense of unease rapidly followed.

I gently set down the weapon, and suddenly the sensation was gone. All of my knowledge and ability returned, but I still had no desire to pick the gun back up.

Rayna did something similar at my side, though she reached for the rifle after it was already on the ground. Her hand hesitated, and the tall gray woman raised it to her lips, trembling, before she turned away from the guns and stared at the beholder.

“BEHOLD,” it roared at us again, and the room shook with the power of its silent voice.

At our side, a BuyMort pod suddenly ripped through the air into existence. The fart of burnt ozone washed over me and I shook out of the daze the beholder had put my mind into.

It left me with a slight headache.

Rayna blinked rapidly and reached for the rifle one more time, before crumpling to the ground entirely. She was breathing and conscious, unable to do anything but lightly moan, I assumed in mortal terror.

I stepped between her and the pod as it measured out a small area on the concrete. A rainbow beam dazzled the room, and a woman stepped out of the light. Her skin was inky black, to the point that it shined and sparkled with iridescence.

The faint flicker of tiny motes of light rose to the surface as she turned her head to look at me, akin to glitter, or stars reflected in water at night. Twin tall, pointed ears rose from her shock white hair, and a pair of red eyes shone in the dark.

The woman was dressed in a very expensive looking business suit, with a knee-length skirt. Every inch of her clothing was covered in a thin pin stripe design that formed the web of a spider in different positions when the light caught it just right. She smiled at me and stepped forward to extend one slender hand in greeting.

“You must be Tyson,” she sighed. Her voice was high and light, and she spoke just above a whisper’s volume. “My name is Lady Taytrinn Shireen, and I represent Quadrum the beholder. It is delicious to meet you. I’ll be Quadrum’s voice to your affiliate, lest it inadvertently kill you lesser species with its thought.”

I nodded, my slack jaw thankfully covered by the helmet, and reached to accept her hand. There was zero chance I was calling her ‘lady’ anything. Boss was bad enough. She was surprisingly warm to the touch, and gentle. I got the distinct impression she was being careful with my hand as she shook it. She looked around at our surroundings and sighed, before reaching into a small handbag at her side.

The item she retracted looked a lot like a laser pointer to me, but when she pointed it at the floor, the still-present BuyMort pod moved over and began warping in items. Within seconds, there was a full lounge meeting area, complete with a small bar cart, all sitting in the middle of the abandoned concrete base.

A couch, armchair, extra cushions, and even a coffee table in the center of it all. The furniture was lovely, and soft.

Lavish, was the word that came to mind, when I sat on the couch this strange elf provided. I was sure she was an elf the instant I saw her ears. Classic tall and pointy. The oversized kind, it was kind of intimidating, like blades on the sides of her head.

Rayna was still in a heap on the floor, and as Taytrinn gracefully sat down, she cast a look at the hunched over woman.

“My master would like to know if your hobb can be trusted. She was trapped in a fight or flight loop before but seems to have calmed some now.” The dark elf glanced at the beholder in the distance, then turned back to Rayna. “You’re going to be let back up, hobb. I hope you understand that this is a sign of good faith. You are not under threat here, nor are any of your tribe.”

Rayna suddenly straightened. She looked at the weapon on the ground but moved into place on the couch beside me instead.

Taytrinn smiled coldly at her, before turning back to face me. “Rayna here has mentioned some brutish stereotypes surrounding beholders, but I can sense that you have questions.”

“Uh. Yeah.” I stopped and cleared my throat as I felt the beholder's attention on me. “I guess, I would like to know what you and . . . uh, Quadrum, are doing here?”

Her smile grew, and she looked down to her lap. “You are so new to the market, aren’t you?” She closed her eyes and raised her head, taking a long, slow breath as the beholder projected a tendril of light into her head, from an eyeball on a stalk that rose from one of its rings.

“Oh my, brand new. Let me ask you, did you go to Affili-Qwest or did Affili-Qwest come to you? Quadrum has studied it so long, and he requests audience. There are so many questions. If all is BuyMort, has all always been BuyMort? We know that in the pre-BuyMort worlds there exist fledgling markets, infantile proto-affiliates that fall asunder at the evolutionary introduction of BuyMort. Quadrum surmises that once upon a time, the multiverse was the same. And this affiliate that created Affili-Qwest, Teslak Cooperative, might have been a proto-affiliate.” She widened her eyes as if the idea was an entirely shocking one. “The Teslak Cooperative might have even competed with BuyMort!”

I grimaced. So much for my secret little boutique. But I also grew curious. Just how old and powerful was this place? I found myself interested in having a back and forth over it with them, maybe exchanging what I knew for what they knew. But I wasn’t going to let them just walk all over me like this.

“If he wants to come here and talk to me about my connections with Teslak, he can schedule an appointment like everyone else.”

Taytrinn clasped her hands in her lap and delicately crossed one long, stockinged leg over the other. “Beholders go where they please and do as they please. The only institution to hold any sway over them is the Church of BuyMort, and that is only because there are several beholders in its ranks, at least officially.” I nodded as she spoke.

“That’s inconvenient. I suppose psychic superpowers have their perks and their own rules though.” I hesitated and looked between Rayna and Taytrinn. “Why here and now?”

The dark elf’s smile grew, and she leaned back in her seat to luxuriate. “Besides you being the only being we’ve ever detected to have been able to interact with and purchase from Teslak, you have also discovered something of interest to my master, and so my master has come.” She glanced at the beholder again, before sighing and turning back to us. “The red Sleem is a birthing block. My employer requires it for study.”

“Oh!” I breathed in relief. “Yeah, sure, all yours. Take the thing, it’s been a menace here.”

Taytrinn laughed, her voice raising to a light musical sound. “Oh no, you misunderstand. We have no desire to take the Sleem anywhere. My master is quite content to do its work right here, in the Sleem’s home environment. The entity claims that makes them more malleable.” The dark elf paused and looked me up and down before clarifying, “Easier to work with.”

She paused there and leaned forward, before gripping a length of her white hair and twisting it up and back, skewering it in place with a solid wood hairpin. The result was a messy bun on top of her head that looked perfectly styled. The sultry elf looked up and fluttered her eyelashes at me as she set down a clipboard on the table between us. It appeared like magic, from the inside of her suit jacket. With another soft smile, she pushed it across the coffee table to me.

I picked it up and started reading. “The beholder entity known in the BuyMort collective as Quadrum would like to enter into an agreement with your affiliate. Interaction shall include but not be limited to . . “ It continued on. And on. The entire thing read like a big non-disclosure agreement, but there was no place to sign, and no suggestion that any of its contents were optional.

In essence, I and anyone in my affiliate who had knowledge of this thing had to keep it quiet. After she agreed, Rayna was allowed to call her hobbs, who had been stopped on the floor above by another barricade, and they joined us to agree as well. The beholder would take our promises seriously, Taytrinn assured me with a smile. This was merely a courtesy, to let us know what we were getting involved in. The beholder looked over each of us as we agreed to secrecy, and then turned and went back to whatever it was doing, hovering over the elevator shaft.

Taytrinn looked over to the entity for a long moment, before nodding and turning back. The beholder sunk down into the elevator shaft, long fleshy tentacles extending from its central rings to feel and touch the walls as it went. Within a moment, the entity was gone from sight, and the pressure of its attention faded.

“Alright. Your hobbs are free to go, but I would adore talking to you some more, Tyson. Do stay with me for a drink, let’s sweeten this deal.” The dark elf uncrossed her legs and stretched out, languidly, like a cat. “Take off that helmet and let me see you, human.”

I hesitated, but it genuinely did feel like there was nothing at all I could do to prevent the beholder from killing me any way it saw fit, so the limited protection my helmet could provide was likely negligible. I unfastened it, lifted it off, and set it down on the coffee table between us, facing Taytrinn with a polite smile.

Her own smile deepened, and the skin around her red eyes bent, but did not wrinkle. “What would you like? Besides a good shave?”

I blinked and frowned, rubbing my three day old beard. “Tequila.”

A drink sounded excellent. A drink with Taytrinn, not so much. Rayna stood to leave and looked at me, once, before she vanished up the stairs to join Tollya and the others. As always, she was inscrutable. Soon after she was gone, I got a text that read simply ‘good luck.’