“So,” Jack says, “Anyonewantto wager whereshegoes between nowandlater?”

“Ten gil on the armory,” says Fennec.

“Two gil on her boss,” continues Hellspring.

“Hmmm, fivegilon the bathroom,” says Jack after a quick pause.

“Denied, we can’t and won’t check,” replies Hellspring.

“Hah, then fivegilon the armory,” returns Jack.

“So who’s going to pay you if you are right?” questions the Other. All three reply at the same time.

“You are.”

“Fine, but I’m going to bet 17 on her not bringing me my money.”

“Ah,” go the triplets with sudden realization. Hellspring fires a small fireball at the gong near the door. A rabbitkin opens the door a short time later and asks what they need. Hellspring hands him a folded piece of paper with instructions to hand it to Fontine’s boss, but only when Fontine isn’t around. He tilts his head slightly in confusion as Fontine is always around, but acknowledges the order and takes off.

“So whereareyou heading afteryou get donehere?” Jack asks.

“Taking the girl back east, then wherever the wind takes me,” is the Other’s reply.

“Should we take that literally or metaphorically?” Fennec inquires.

“Yes.”

“Fine, keep your secrets.”

“On an entirely unrelated note,” interjects Hellspring in order to get the conversation back on track. “Honest timeline, when are you thinking stage 2 will begin?”

“Haaaaa, that’s the question of the century really. Literally too, we’ve been in stage 1 for several decades already. We’ve just now had enough stockpiles built up that we can start gathering real world data. Do you know how difficult it is to generate nine million tonnes of micromagic? And we only have enough for two continents really, so that’s why stage 2 exists.”

“Two? There’s clearly us, but what about the other one?” asks Fennec.

“Just a little place I call home. Make sure you let me know if you ever decide to visit, some of the locals are a bit skittish.”

“There’s one or two companies that are willing to risk going overseas. What direction would they need to head?”

“Northeast. A loooooong way northeast if you head there directly. I’d say probably a half a year if you fly without breaks? I’m no good with distances you know, but that seems about right. But! Back to the topic, what’s the easiest way to spread around all that micromagic you may ask! With a dragon! With Higgadon the Great to be precise. He was bored.”

“The ancient dragon,” begins Fennec. “At the center of the continent. The one that lives on the top of Mount Doom. The one that all our ancestors say to not anger and not make wild requests of, and to otherwise just generally avoid since he doesn’t actually care to cull the monsters around the mountain except once every hundred years or so.”

“Yep!” the Other says with a smile. “Honestly, I’m wondering if the other ancient dragons are bored… Maybe I’ll ask around, see if any of them want a project. Actually…”

As the Other trails off and begins muttering, Jack and Fennec look at each other and shrug, grabbing food off of the table while he’s lost in his thoughts. A minute or two passes by where the two talk about life and family while eating, with Hellspring interjecting from time to time.

“Bah!” shouts the Other while ruffling his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll pitch it as entertainment. Or a game… But would they care…”

“You’ll neverknow until youknow, youknow,” says Jack in all his sagely wisdom.

“Curious,” begins Fennec slowly. “How many ancient dragons do you actually know? I mean, there can’t be that many of them right? On the entire continent we only have Higgadon the Great.”

“You mean you’ve only found the one. There should be two more somewhere, but they probably haven’t moved in centuries so you may mistake them for small hills. But as for those I’ve met personally~? Probably about 50 or so. More or less.”

As Hellspring looks thoughtful, Jack has his mouth ajar, and Fennec rubs his temples, Fontine knocks on the door and strides in wearing leather armor, gauntlets, and greaves, with a hybrid scale-mail skirt with what appears to be a standard issue equipment belt.

“Quick!” interrupts the Other before she could speak. “Guess what’s giving Fennec a headache and I’ll buy you something nice while we’re out!”

Fontine blinks and goes “um” when she catches Jack’s eyes looking at the skirt after the question snapped him out of his trance.

“Dragons?” she says hesitantly.

“Yes indeed!” declares the Other. “Now Tumblerun, pay me ten gil for giving away the answer.”

“But Ididn’tmeanto!”

“Um, excuse me, but can I know what’s going on?” Fontine asks Hellspring and Fennec as the Other tries to browbeat Jack out of 10 gil.

“Well-“

“No,” declares Fennec bluntly, interrupting Hellspring. “Because if you know there’s a small but real chance we’ll never see you again.”

“Oh hush,” states Hellspring as Fontine looks surprised. “He just tries to drag in anyone who is willing to listen and Fennec doesn’t want to lose someone of your caliber for any length of time when it means his paperwork would increase trying to run this place. How adventurous are you feeling?”

Fennec glares at the Lord Duke with arms crossed as he hit the issue on the nose.

“I’ve never really been out of the city for long, let alone getting involved with dragons, so…”

“What do you specialize in?” cuts in the Other who has Jack in a headlock. “Combat wise that is.”

“Support magic and hand-to-hand combat. Quite useful in dealing with employees and gamblers actually, so this job was a great fit.”

“Oh~? So what did your boss say when you told her I was kidnapping you for the evening?”

With a blank look due to the phrasing, Fontine replies on reflex, “Something along the lines of, ‘Don’t worry about it, I figured that old turtle had something annoying planned so I sent you to get experience dealing with him.’”

“So your boss is Bertha from Lark Hill. I was wondering what she would do in her retirement years. Well,” the Other says releasing Jack who taps out by pounding on the Other’s back, ready to go? Night waits for no-one.”

“Yes, I think s-“ Fontine begins as someone knocks at the door.

In walks the rabbitkin from earlier, holding a briefcase. He clears his throat, opens the briefcase and says, “Your payment, good sir.”

Inside are sixteen “cards” with a large red square on one side with a small black square in one corner. The red square on the last card however displayed a white number.

“Oh, this is new,” the Other says, picking up the last card first. “You finally got someone to figure out how to display the count on these rather than just filling out the red square. It still caps at one million I see. I take it that the number only updates when you put magic into it?”

“Started that about twelve years ago. Seriously though, the hardest part was the development in the first place. The counts work with the standard coins on the continent, it will reject everything that doesn’t fit that parameter, including if they’re covered in dirt or blood. Clean coins only. If you have more coin to load, just stack them on the card and pour in magic. If you want to take small amounts out, it’s similar to magic bags because, well, they basically are, just with the extra counting circuit. Black box verifies it is only valid coins in there. We had… an incident a while ago.”

“Say no more,” says the Other while sweeping up the cards and putting them away. “Also, shall we just call it a wash on the other business?”

“Agreed,” say the triplets to the marginal stupefaction of their audience.

“Well then, let’s head off!” the Other declares as he rips another hole in spacetime. “I’ll see you when I see you, if I see you, when I do.”

With that he strides through the hole with a flippant salute to the Lord Duke, who just shakes his head. Before Fontine hardly gets another step towards the hole, she’s stopped and bombarded with advice.

“Don’t let him convince you to do anything you don’t want to do. If you need to just throw him through a wall, he’ll be fine, you couldn’t kill him if you tried,” declares Fennec as if he’s speaking to his younger sister.

“Ifanythingcatches youreyes asyou’rewalking justgrab hisarm andpullhim overto lookatit. Hereallymeant itwhen hesaidhe wouldbuyyou somethingforthat questionearlier,” machine-guns Jack.

“Seriously though, if you feel like an adventure there’s literally no safer place to be than next to him, and especially given our conversation earlier, much to Fennec’s chagrin, very few experience the things he does. We’ll welcome you back tomorrow or whenever you make it home,” says Hellspring, as if to a favorite niece.

“Double-seriously,” jumps in Fennec for the last word. “Don’t let him just do whatever. He has literally let himself be kidnapped before because he felt like it. If you fight he’ll probably fight, if you don’t, he’ll do whatever he feels like, and nobody knows what that will be, not even himself!”

“Yes, yes, I’m a terror,” the Other says, sticking his head and an arm back through the rip in spacetime. “A hundred years of pain and suffering to those who invoke my ire, yadda yadda yadda. Yoink!”

With that the Other snatches a handful of glazed sparrow-roc skewers while he magically floats Fontine through the hole as she tries to sort out if she should be panicking about the sudden levitation and locomotion. As soon as she’s through, the hole closes.

“So,” the nearly forgotten rabbitkin begins, “Does stuff like that always happen around here? Honestly this is like my first real day on the job.”

“Only on Tuesdays,” Fennec says sarcastically, “once every ten years or so. Go ahead and take the briefcase back to Bertha, Bill.”

- - - - - -

After closing up the hole in spacetime just off an alleyway by one of the main roads, the Other hands Fontine two of the skewers before wandering out of the alley and into the crowds. Remembering the Lord Duke’s statement about the Other getting lost, she quickly follows.

“Do you know where you’re heading?” Fontine asks while briefly contemplating the skewer before chewing on it.

“More or less. Though word may have gotten ahead of me that someone was looking to buy her so the price may be higher than I’d like. Hopefully my prior disguises were good enough…”

“Since we’re on the subject, you have been kidnapped before? Why?”

“Perhaps a better question would be how many times, but I suppose you mean the time, Windwalker, Tumblerun, Hellspring, and I were trying to flush out some bandits on the Northern road. Two carriages, Hellspring in front, me driving the one in rear and covered head to toe in a long, drab brown cloak. Classic log across the road, he blasted it apart and we ran through with the intention of my carriage getting caught in the debris and ‘breaking down’ while he forgets to look back. Great plan if I do say so, even before I improved on it.”

Sensing the Other wants her to ask the question, she obliges and says, “So what did you do then?”

“Ha ha~! I still laugh even thinking about it, sorry, but I cast a personal magic on myself, the Ideal Woman charm. Oh-ho-ho, not only could you hear the bandits hauling me off to their camp, arguing about what to do with me, I forgot to dispel it when the other three raided the camp a couple of hours later. Whoooo, the look on Windwalker and Tumblrun’s face! And I’ve never seen Hellspring look so pale, almost pink even! They thought they had the wrong camp for a solid minute, I kid you not!”

“First,” Fontine begins, “How long did it take them to trust you again after that. And second, what does that charm actually do, and why have I never heard of it before? It seems useful.”

“Eh, heh-heh-heh, about a week or so. As far as why, too many problems with it even putting the mana needs aside. A pretty severe cognitive dissonance if multiple people talk about the target’s features, though you can learn a bit about their fetishes if they have loose lips about what they see. Charms and Mind magics have a way of not working how most expect them to. Would probably work for women working the auction house main events. Or more properly, one woman, though I’ve never tried two people at once. Twins maybe? Or would it be yet another ideal? Meh, there’s probably nobody else besides me that could keep it up for more than ten minutes anyway.”

“Is there any magic you can’t use? I saw part of the exhibition match you know.”

“Curse breaking magics of light. If you set my proficiency of magics on a scale zero to one hundred, with the hundred being my healing magic, curse breaking would be zero, light would be one, and the elementals would be in the tens and twenties. All the attacks I used were basic spells, and the field magics were special applications of spacetime magic, so while they looked impressive they weren’t anything extraordinary.”

Fontine blinks at the absurdity contained in the last sentence before shaking her head. They continue walking through the crowds, even finding a broad wooden pin with an image of the Other during the match burned into the wood while holding his weapons. Finding it amusing, he buys five of them and wears one. A short while later, they turn onto the street dealing in pleasures and persons.