Jessica stormed into the room while I was still trying to convince my brick-headed father to just take the money. She came in and started to open and close her mouth and I held up a finger at my father, shushing him, and turned to Jessica, which only had the veins in his new arms, and veins in his head started to throb and bulge as he became more adamant.

“Shush. You need something, Jess?” I greeted her and gave her the opportunity to butt into the conversation.

“I need Akira, Violet, she…” Jessica blurted before she held up a giant egg made of vines.

“That’s Violet? Did you make her mad or something?” I mentioned as it appeared as though Violet might have started to pout and curled in on herself.

“I don’t know, she just feels sluggish and then did this.” She sniffled, trying her best to keep her tears and worry from overcoming her. Seeing my best friend so fraught with worry for her companion, my heart started to break. With a small sigh, I took her by the elbow and started to march out. Almost as though it were an afterthought, I tossed the coin satchel that we’d been arguing about onto the table, leaving some parting words to my father who faltered as I was using a distraught Jessica as a shield to exit with.

“We are going to leave, you WILL use those Dens to start rebuilding our home by the time we’re done with our next requisition or so help me by the devourer I’ll make the entire forge out of flowers!” This threat elicited a small chuckle out of Jessica as I escorted her out of her own home as my father started his refusal.

We exited the apothecary and I managed to leave the grumbling curses of my father behind, a small smile crossed my face as I heard the sound of coins being picked up in an angry swipe.

“Now to run away so he has to do it.” I shared with Jessica as she chuckled and stepped with me into the ruins of the old forge.

I escorted Jessica to the middle of the ruins and took a look around from the tips of my toes, trying to remember what I saw Akira and Zoe doing from the kitchen window. There was a singular arrow stuck in a crevice in the foundation. The sight of it jostled my memory and I started to head out of the ruins remembering that Akira had left in this general direction with a giant crate on a shoulder before he had disappeared.

“What would that even look like?” Jessica trailed off, her question catching me off guard.

“Huh?”

“Your threat, a forge made of flowers?”

“Oh, I just said that as dad only does difficult things when given an ultimatum. I just said something that came to mind, it was the worst thing I could imagine on the spot.”

I continued to listen to Jessica's laughter and was simply glad that I could distract her a bit and improve her mood. Though my empty threat did start me to muse on the idea, my imagination got the best of me as I thought of a giant bulbous tree-like structure made of hardened vines, billowing grey and black smoke from various hollow branches. I’d simply cover the outside of it from roots to canopy in bright and colorful flowers.

The more and more I thought about it, I could not help but wonder if it would be possible, instead of buying wood that had already been... chopped?... to the right sizes, I could simply grow anything I wanted, it would only take time and mana, which were easy to come by.

I dragged Jessica to a few stores, poking my head in and taking a look or asking the shopkeepers if Zoe had shown up with a young man to sell or barter some things. I got a few odd looks when describing Akira, but I put it out of my mind and we continued down the street. Jessica’s mood was improving as I shared my idea on how I could make good on my threat to my dad about a flower forge.

After going through several dozen shops, we exited one to catch Zoe smiling from ear to ear as she skipped along with Akira playing up that he’s unhappy while in tow.

“Hey Cara, Akira was being mean and snapped two military bows I borrowed from my uncle.” She condemned Akira as I gave him an awkward look as to why he’d do such a thing.

“You kept summoning more boxes of arrows after we agreed that the previous one was the last one.” He groused in his defense.

“And you were foolish to think I didn’t bring backups of everything! Anyways, because he broke them and owes me money to replace them, I’ll need to shake you down for some benefits because he’s broke.” She derided him and then turned to me with a smile that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Heh heh, well I forced all my money on my dad to rebuild the smithy, so I’m broke now as well and was thinking we should try another requisition.” I laughed with a hint of nervous energy, as her smile widened further.

“That sounds great! Also, I don’t need money from you, you can just pay me back in mana embers!”

“You’re just going to make a bigger soul storage aren’t you?” I ask with a note of skepticism in my voice, not realizing that I’ve more or less agreed and had not ironed out how many mana embers she’d want or how expensive the bows were.

“Guilty as charged!”

Jessica was practically falling apart beside us. She kept opening her mouth, to only shut it as we continued to chat. Finally finding a lull in the conversation, she screwed up her courage and thrust out a vine-like egg into Akira’s face.

“Please. Take a look and tell me what’s wrong with Violet?”

“Oh, she is finally undergoing the vel-shiraj.”

“The what now?” We all asked in unison.

“A rite of passage, the first step to becoming more like her bonded. She’ll start to develop features like Jessica. Perhaps during her third vel-shiraj, she’ll look like a plant twin sister of Jessica.”

“How long will it take?” Jessica worried as she started to fret over the vine egg.

“Depends if you keep feeding her blood. A moon or two without any, if you keep it up, only a few days.” He replied while he shook his hand to imply that there would be some uncertainty.

“How can I feed her if she’s in an egg?”

“She is the egg, all of her is it. A small cut on your finger and smear it across the outer shell would be enough. There are ways of writing out in blood runes of binding to force the submission of a creature in this state. I figure you would not want that, but it is something that could be done to steal her from you or if you ever found a youngling in the wilds you could do so in order to force subservience to yourself.” He divulged, his voice becoming very serious all of a sudden to imply how seriously we should take this.

“That sounds so cruel…” Jessica quivered as she retracted the vine egg protectively and started to rock it back and forth a bit as though Violet was a small child needing reassurance.

With that out of the way, we head off to the guild. It was midday and the guild was in constant motion, especially after the other kids our age had finished with training courses and were coming and going from doing small requisitions.

The atmosphere was a little weird as people who were chatting would quiet down and point at us and then talk in hushed whispers. Perhaps it was not our group as a whole, but more like everyone was pointing at Jessica who was walking around holding a giant vine egg protectively.

We made our way up to the third floor to take a look at the silver requisition board that was made available to us after the recent little tournament and having our badges upgraded to pseudo-silver.

We looked at the board and it was Akira who asked a few questions that we were happy to answer as we were going over the board.

“SD? And why are some crossed out?”

“SD is for Silver Dens, they are worth a thousand times a regular Den. As for them being crossed out, that just means that someone took the requisition already and either failed, died, or returned and said that it was impossible.” Zoe stated, happy to divulge anything she could about finances.

We continued to review the requisition board until I reached out and ripped one off and stormed off as with every beat of my heart, my fury rose.