3.06

“Oh Lord Goddess, I beseech you to aid us in solving our vexations. What was that? QUIET DOWN EVERYONE I CAN HEAR HER! Oh, Dear Goddess, mind you repeat that?” - Priestess Cordelia receiving divine insight, leading her to write ‘Fireproof Heretics and you. Why you don’t need to give up on tradition.’

As Peps began his healing thing, I glanced at Greenie, “Why do you have a hat?” I asked, gesturing at the tiny wizard hat that completely covered his cap.

“Cat,” it simply replied.

I raised my eyebrows but before I could question further, Peps stood up.

“Fixed,” Peps declared as he gently patted the tiny rainbow gecko.

“Thanks!”

“No problem!” Peps cheerfully replied, gently shaking the tiny gecko’s front paw.

The gecko let out another chirp of appreciation, before asking, “What are you doing here?”

I gestured at the store, “Trying and failing to create a business,” which Greenie promptly translated.

“What’s the problem?”

“Aesthetic issues,” I replied, Greenie and Yellow’s translation echoing me. “We’re trying to make it look good.”

“But we can’t really manage it,” Peps added, “all we have to use are moss and mushrooms.”

The gecko’s head perked up, “I can help, but please wait a moment,” it said before scurrying off and disappearing.

A few minutes later, the walls and the ground started to blur like a glitch, before several dozen geckos unstealthed right before us.

“We can help!” They chirped together, all of their bodies shifting through a myriad of colours.

Meanwhile…

“Holy shit,” Noam muttered under his breath, hundreds of floating light particles surrounding him, “When did killing people become this easy?”

We organised the geckoes onto the walls. At first, we just wanted to create some sort of colourful wallpaper. But then a gecko suggested that they could manage moving images just as easily.

Peps and I agreed that we should get them to make some kind of moving pattern and as we began to direct them onto the right wall, a cloaked figure enter the hall we were in, setting down a blanket in between two stores to the right of us. I recognised him as the dude who sold us potions before but otherwise didn’t comment. He quietly sat down and began cleaning various trinkets, before setting them down on the blanket.

Somewhere along the line, the potato woke up and began directing the geckos in a distinctly militaristic like fashion. We went through dozens of different variations with the geckos, my mushrooms and Peps’ bushes. Finding out halfway that concentrating too many geckos in one spot would block out the natural light of the glowing moss since they weren’t translucent. It took a while to create organise them into something that didn’t resemble a crime against good taste. Eventually, we settled on them covering up the front side of the cross the potato had made earlier. Four geckos shifted to a much brighter red compared to the old potato red which just looked maroon. Peps grew some glowing moss on the sides of the cross to create a light outline. We repeated this a few times. The potato producing rulers to help us place them evenly across the walls with my light shrooms interspersed between each cross.

After a long, long while. We finally finished and breathed a sigh of satisfaction at the finished product.

It was now that I realised a major problem.

“Did we really just spend this much effort for a one-time shop?”

Both the potato and Peps stared at me with a blank look.

“I mean, we can’t really be here 24/7, there’s no security so this stuff is bound to be gone,” I continued.

Only the snort of laughter from the cloaked merchant answered me.

“Amateurs,” he sneered from behind us, sitting condescendingly on his blanket.

It was getting noisy and Ven didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. All she wanted to do was spend all day sleeping and get rich. Maybe eat a few tasty snacks as well.

She had placed herself in one of those small hallways that lead out of the main halls, usually to toilets and staff exits. Just so that she would be out of the way, and so that other players wouldn’t bother her as much.

But lots of people were gathering in the hallway outside and it was tiring. There was a lot of shouting, something about a ‘purple horned cunt’ ganking everyone going near a certain area and how they were going to ‘tear him so many new ones he’ll look like cheese’.

Honestly, Ven didn’t care, she was comfortably resting. She would shut them up but there were a lot of them now and she was already full after someone tried to steal from her before.

Ven quietly sighed and resigned herself to another hour of waiting out the mob. ‘Hurrrrry uuup…’

Though honestly, if they wanted to murder someone that badly then hurry up! From the tremors, there were at least thirty of them already. ‘Lazy idiots…’

She froze, feeling tremors heading towards her. Opening up a small slit, she formed an eye and stealthily glanced at the approaching figure.

A tall brown lizardman, his clothes appeared bloody and ravaged, as if he had just been through a warzone. He shook his head, then shakily stumbled forward, before falling against the wall opposite Ven, before- “BLUARGHF!” vomiting all over the ground in front of her.

Disgusted, Ven hurriedly withdrew herself, shrinking as far back as possible to avoid the puke. Retracting the eye back inside her shell.

Without her eye, she couldn’t see what the lizardman did next, but he heard him rasp out in a slurred voice, “What’s a vending machine doing hereee…” before hearing him slump and hit the ground.

‘Fuck it,’ she thought to herself, ‘I’m moving.’