Vigor Mortis

Chapter 20: Culture Shock

Staying up late is exhausting, but thankfully I have Rosco to keep me company this time. Hours upon hours passed before light reaches the island once more, and Penelope manages to sleep through all of it. Good. At least someone got rest. The parasite grows ever so slowly stronger, but the first thing Penelope does when waking up is scan for problems.

“…Still nothing. I seem to be fine,” she murmurs. “You, however, look like you got run over by a cart. Are you all right?”

“Didn’t sleep,” I answer back, yawning. “Wanted to make sure nothing happened overnight. Was afraid the slime would start hurting you. Or escape. Or have a baby. Or something.”

She looks taken aback.

“You really don’t have to do that for me. I am fine.”

I shake my head.

“Remus said assume everything in the forest is deadly. Then he said to watch you. I’m gonna watch you.”

“I… see,” she says slowly, looking away. “Would you like me to wake you up a little? It’s no substitute for real sleep, but it should help.”

I frown, confused. She’s so nice all of a sudden! Is this a trick? It doesn’t really feel like one, and Penelope is hardly the subtle type. Oh fuck, is it the slime? Is it controlling her brain? Was it going to try to kill me? Could it kill me fast enough if I dropped my magic resistance?

Could I afford not getting a magical pick-me-up if I’m supposed to watch her all day?

“Sure,” I say, body tense.

Penelope walks over and casts something. I watch her very carefully. Her hands are moving, so it must be a learned spell. Unless she’s covering for her natural magic, or… doing something else with magic that I don’t understand, I guess. It just doesn’t feel like she going to murder me, though, and trusting that instinct I let her cast. Sure enough, it perks me right up. I shoot her a relieved smile, nodding.

“Thank you.”

“O-of course,” she answers, pouting a little. “It’s the least I can do, if you’re up all night for my sake. Anyway, did you not have something you wanted to do?”

“Need to do,” I correct. “Gotta buy food for home. Talk to family. Stuff like that.”

“I suppose I’m stuck with you, then,” Penelope says glumly.

I smile a bit. I’m a little worried about taking a parasite-infested girl to see my family, but it’s a parasite I can sense. It won’t be slipping into anyone else on my watch.

“Well, hey, maybe it’ll be good for you to get out of the room and do something other than torture rats,” I tell her.

“Torture…?” she looks briefly surprised, then gawks indignantly. “I-I don’t torture rats! It’s research! My magic is painless.”

“Uh-huh. What about the ones you mess up on and kill slowly?”

“That’s an accident,” she grumbles. “It’s just the consequence of knowledge.”

I shrug.

“Eh, I’m just teasing. I’ve killed rats for worse reasons. Come on, get dressed and let’s go.”

She gives me a weird look at that, but starts getting out of her nightclothes. When she pulls a particularly fancy outfit out of her drawers, I wince.

“Uh… you might not wanna wear that, Penelope.”

“What? Why not?” she demands. “I like this dress.”

“Cuz I don’t wanna get robbed,” I tell her. “Do you have anything that looks a little less… rich?”

She snorts.

“I’ll not lower myself for fear of some random ruffians. Besides, we’re hunters. If anyone tries something, they’re going to regret it.”

I sigh. Whatever. I’ll deal with that problem when it happens. She puts on her fancy outfit, some kind of frilly red thing that helps push up and show off her chest. How much dye went into making something like that? Was it blood colored? Of course she likes it blood-colored. I continue wearing my armor from the hunt, making sure to bring my spear and knife. The brownish, dried monster gut stains, while technically also blood-colored, do not match Penelope’s dress very well. Hopefully, though, they’ll get people to think twice about messing with us. I start to exit as soon as she’s ready, causing her to raise an eyebrow.

“You’re wearing that out in the city?” she asks, incredulous.

“Yes,” I say firmly. “Now come on, I want breakfast.”

A few grumbles under her breath later, she follows me down to the mess hall. Steaming soups are abundant, warming my tummy with the broth very possibly made from a few corpses I brought home. It has somewhat of a burrow-hound flavor, and as tempted as I am to point this out to Penelope, I’m way too busy eating to tease her. I have my priorities straight.

After stuffing my face— and then waiting for Penelope’s slow butt to finish eating— I make it to the front desk. It’s time to collect my pay for the day. And the pay for the days I’ve been on the job. And my cut of the pay from the job.

When the receptionist tells me how much that all was, I have to go sit down.

“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine—”

“Vita, what are you doing?’ Penelope asks, rudely interrupting me.

“How many meals is that?” I demand. “How much… why are we getting paid so much???”

“Vita, it’s not that much,” Penelope says flatly. “Quit being so dramatic. This isn’t even factoring in the cut we’ll get from the monster parts we brought back.”

A squeaking noise escapes my throat, causing Penelope to roll her eyes. How can she be so… so cavalier about this? This was serious! This was crazy money! What the heck am I going to do with it all?

A few minutes later I collect myself enough to return to the receptionist and ask if she can hold onto… most of that. As loathe as I am to allow anyone else to even think of touching my cash, she’s the person responsible for giving it to me in the first place. If she was going to cheat me, she’d just tell me a lower number, right?

I only take two day’s pay for now, enough to get a bit of extra food for everyone. I don’t trust myself with any more than that. Given my luck, it would all just get stolen.

I set off into the city, making sure Penelope stays very close behind. It was more for her own basic safety than anything else. She grumbles and complains a little as we move to the poorer districts, gets indignant when we go even poorer, and by the time I got anywhere close to the place I actually intended to buy food from, she was downright disbelieving.

The streets here are more dirt than stone, the half-dilapidated houses cracked and crumbling. I walk in zig-zag patterns that Penelope quickly learns to match, dodging thieves, horseshit, and occasionally human shit as we make our way down the road. Squatters line the streets, many only kept from pawing at the rich girl’s legs by a death glare from me. She’s an obvious target, and she’s starting to feel it. Still, when I arrive at my favorite stall, run by a toothless old man mixing grains with water and cooking them on a rock, she has yet more shit to give me.

“This? Vita, this is the place you’re buying food from? This can’t possibly be safe. What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Penelope, shut up.”

She gawks at me, clearly furious. I hold her gaze, glaring right back. This was not the time or place to banter with her. Under the weight of my stare, she swallows whatever she was going to say. Good. I turn my attention back to the bread seller.

“Sorry about her, Dathus. Could I get double the usual today?”

“Of course, of course!” the old man says, laughing good-naturedly. “You look like a servant that just ordered a noblewoman around! Just made my day, it did.”

“I am a—”

“Penelope, shut up!” I say loudly.

She does, thank fuck. Was she about to say she was a noble? Firstly, is she? I hadn’t known that. But secondly, is she fucking suicidal?

Dathus, my favorite bread-maker (not that the competition was exactly fierce) chuckles again, handing me my order. It’s flat, it’s flavorless, but it fills bellies and that’s what matters. I shove as much as I can onto Penelope, hoping to keep her occupied.

“I was worried about you after you stopped showing up, Vita!” Dathus commented as I collected my family meal. “Did anything happen?”

“Oh, you know. Almost got eaten by monsters a few times. Nothing as bad as here.”

He laughs at that and I pay, parting ways. As soon as I can, I duck up an alleyway to take the stares off of me and my teammate. If I wasn’t with her she’d be mugged and raped! With all the ways people were rotting here, they wouldn’t even notice if she added to it!

“Penelope, it’s not safe here at all,” I insist when the two of us are alone. “You can’t go around saying crazy shit like being a noble.”

“Which begs the question, Vita, why are we here?” she hisses back.

“I told you already. I live here. We’re bringing my family breakfast.”

“This is not a breakfast!”

“It’s better than nothing,” I say flatly.

“Barely!”

“Well that matters!” I shout, turning on her. “It matters a lot, okay? We usually get nothing! So get off my back about it!”

I glare at her, absolutely fuming, and the haughty demeanor just… drops. Vanishes. She shrinks away, unable to meet my eyes.

“Okay. Sorry.”

It was so un-Penelope-like that I couldn’t react with anything but confusion, my rage sputtering at nothing. I turn and lead the rest of the way to my house in silence.

“Vita!”

“Vita’s here!”

“Vita, Vita, Vita!”

The kids barrel out of the house to tackle me, clamoring for first dibs on the meal. I hand out the food, making them promise not to steal anything from Penelope. I glance her way to try and see her reaction to that, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. Her expression is nothing but horror.

Ah, she probably hasn’t seen anything like this. The kids are skin and bones, like I had been not long ago. So thin I’m afraid they’ll break every time they hug me. The wrists, the ribs, the gaunt features… it’s like looking at someone halfway in the grave.

No, not just “someone.” Children. Dying, suffering children that I’m barely keeping alive, barely giving hope to. It was completely normal to me. Yet to Penelope…

“Watcher’s eyes,” she swears quietly, covering her mouth with a hand. “This is your family…? You’re raising them?”

“No, Lyn and Rowan are raising them. I used to be them. Then it turned out I had a talent.”

I shrug, leaving it at that because that’s really all there is to it. There’s nothing special about me whatsoever. I just lucked out, and even though my luck is cursed it’s better than no luck at all.

“I… may I…” Penelope chokes over her words, struggling to even speak. She points at one. “May I cast?”

I blink in surprise, but nod. Hell yes I’ll let her cast, they need all the help they can get.

“Everyone, this is Penelope. She’s my teammate, and she’s a biomancer. Do what she says, okay? She’s going to help.”

They crowd around her immediately, fully aware of how rare an opportunity this is.

“Is Lyn or Rowan around?”

The kids confirm my suspicions; they were both out and working. Unfortunate, but not unexpected. I’ll have to visit them another time to figure out the money thing. Penelope, meanwhile, is already starting her craft, her hands steady even as her body shakes. Enduring her bitching all the way over here is worth it and then some to get pro bono biomancer work for all the kids. Although, I suspect…

“They’re like you,” Penelope says quietly. “They have the same problems you do.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Told you so.”

She swallows.

“It’s… hard to believe you used to look like this,” she whispers. “I did what I could. A lot of them were hiding bruises or scabs. They all had lice, which I killed for them.”

“Oh, thank you. That helps a lot.”

“I… I can’t help with the rest,” she continues, ignoring the praise. “Not unless we got them more food, and I come back every day, and…”

I shrug.

“We’re working on the first part.”

“You’ll… need to get them more than bread, then,” she answers. “They’ll get sick if you only feed them bread and water.”

My eyes go wide.

“Wait, really?”

“Yes. I think so. Biomancers are still figuring out how it works, but… you’ll need vegetables. Meat. Something tart, every so once in a while.”

I nod. No reason to doubt her. She knows way more about this stuff than I do. The kids all look like they’re doing a lot better, and unlike Penelope they’re now parasite-free. Shit, that food would cost a lot… but I guess I’m rich.

“I owe you for this,” I tell her. “Big time.”

She huffs, getting a bit of that Penelopeness back in her features.

“Please. I’m a biomancer. This is nothing less than what’s expected of me.”

“I’ve never seen any other biomancers offering to help” I say frankly. “You helped anyway. I owe you.”

She just looks away, her expression complex beyond what I can identify. I stand up, smacking the hand of one of the kids for trying to grab my knife. Some of them can be pretty sneaky, but I’m damn hard to sneak up on now.

“Well, we should get going, then,” I announce. “That’s pretty much all I needed to do to—”

I stop, frowning as some familiar feelings pop into my sensory range. It was Squigs and Frigs. Based on the path they were taking, it was unlikely they were heading towards the shack. I wonder what they’re up to. If Penelope hadn’t been here, I would want to try talking to them. As-is, probably not the best idea. I don’t want to piss any of them off, especially not now that Penelope is finally starting to open up and be nice a little.

I keep a mental eye on where they seem to be going, but take care to lead Penelope in a very different direction on our way out. They don’t make any move to follow us, going about whatever business they’re going about. Probably killing someone.

“Well, this is about the only thing I needed to do,” I say. “What about you?”

“Hmm?” Penelope asks, looking up from being lost in thought.

“I said is there anything you want to do? If we’re stuck together until Remus gets back, I can follow you instead of the reverse if you have things to do.”

“Oh. Um. Well, there are a few things I… hrm. But you… ugh. We would need to…”

“Yyyyes?” I prompt, trying to get something coherent out of her.

“Um. Well. Perhaps we should… head back to the guild. I’d like to see if Norah is around. She wasn’t in the dorm last night.”

I nod.

“Okay. We can do that. This way.”

I turn down another alleyway, bypassing what would have been a mugging two blocks ahead of us.

“You know these streets well, don’t you?” she asks.

“Yup,” I confirm. “Kinda have to.”

“Yes, they’re not very well-planned, are they? It must have been dreadfully difficult learning it all.”

I shrug. They’re kind of weirdly put together, but the streets have their own sort of logic when you get used to them. I feel the muggers move position, trying to find another spot to ambush us. Could they see where we are somehow? Maybe hear us talking? There are only six of them and they’re all wimps. Penelope and I can probably stomp them. It’s not really worth the effort, though.

“…Okay, I know these roads are complicated, but I’m certain you just turned us around,” Penelope comments.

“I did. Muggers ahead. They might be tracking us somehow, I’m gonna throw them off.”

Her eyes widen and she nods, letting me do my thing. Not talking seemed to do the trick, and after a few more twists and turns, the people following us went the wrong way, eventually leaving our sensory radius.

“We’re clear,” I announce softly, just the same as I had in the forest.

Penelope shudders at that, shaking her head.

“I’m starting to see why nothing seems to faze you, Vita.”

“It is what it is.”

Nothing else bothers us on the way back. Norah is inside, which I announce well before either of us can see the guild building.

“What did you want us all for, anyway?”

“You’ll see,” she answers, managing a bit of a smile.

We find Norah in the courtyard, practicing with some kind of two-edged stabbing sword. She’d downgraded the size of her shield a little, keeping it in front as she drilled cuts and thrusts.

“Hi, Norah,” I say, waving.

“Vita. Penelope. Hey.” The tall woman barely glances at us as her drills continue. “You guys here to practice?”

“Not this time,” Penelope says. “We’re here for you.”

That gets her attention, and she stops stabbing at the air. She shakes her head, glistening droplets of sweat flying off her forehead.

“How can I help?”

“I’m stuck with Vita until Instructor Remus returns,” Penelope explains. “Please, please, help me get her into a damn bath.”

Norah blinks. I blink. Then a grin shoots up Norah’s face, and she lets her shield drop to the ground.

“Oh hell yes. Is this an invite, Penelope?”

“It might be,” she says smugly.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why are we talking about baths? I take baths.”

“Ohhhh no you don’t!” Norah says, sheathing her sword and hurrying up to our room, stripping armor on the way. “That public area cold water shit? That’s not a bath.”

“Yes… it is?”

“I’m glad you came to me for this, Penelope,” Norah says solemnly. “I see now how bad she has it. You can count on me.”

“I appreciate it,” Penelope answers as we follow an excited Norah into our room. “Now take that armor off, Vita. You’re way too filthy.”

“I’m too filthy to take a bath…?”

“Armor. Off. Norah, can you get her something nice to wear? Use one of my outfits. I’ll try to save her hair.”

“My hair is fine! What are you all doing???”

Norah just cracks her knuckles.

“Hold still, Vita. There’s a bath invite on the line.”

Something about the way she says that makes me scared to do anything else. I hold stock still, letting Norah buzz around and pull parts of my armor off with surprising speed. Soon I’m in nothing but underwear, heart beating fast as Norah pulls out and assesses outfit after outfit from Penelope’s bulging wardrobe. Penelope herself stands behind me, trying against all odds to untangle my possibly-literal rat’s nest of hair.

“What is happening?” I squeak in terror.

“We’re making you pretty,” Norah answers, looking between a bright blue dress and a white silk (actual silk!) robe.

“But why?”

“So we can make you even prettier,” Penelope answers. “You’ve never had a proper girl’s outing in your life, have you?”

“…We’re going to steal jewelry?”

“Wh— No! What?”

“That’s what Lyn calls it!”

Penelope and Norah both stare at me, concerned.

“As in Lyn the Metal Thief?”

Oh. Fuck.

“Um. N-no. Different Lyn,” I stammer.

“…Right,” Penelope murmurs. “Well. No. We’re going to take you to a bathhouse. A real, private bathhouse. With soap and hot water and perfumes and massages.”

“Wouldn’t hot water hurt?” I ask.

“Oh, this poor child!” Norah moans dramatically. “Penelope, she knows naught of the joys of the world!”

I pout.

“M’not a child,” I insist.

“And yet,” Penelope says smugly, pushing me forward. “Okay, Norah. Dress her up. I’ve done all I can do.”

Norah rubbed her hands together gleefully, sending a fear through me that only Lyn had ever previously been able to evoke.

She was in older sister mode.