by Sarah Lin
That was where the cheating came in. When it came to Fiyu's turn, Theo flexed the muscles of his left foot inside his shoe. Fiyu noticed without any sign of surprise, since their signals were familiar by now, but when it came to her turn, she increased the bet and called for another stick.
Communicating between them was an immense advantage, and it would have been even more effective at strategic games, but Theo had hesitated to try those. With many Ichili in the city, he was concerned that they must have a way to detect such cheating. Avoiding detection was essential to keep earning money, which had totaled to four hundred Fithan Discs. That would have attracted attention, if it hadn't been spread across several gambling dens and different nights. Nauda wasn't with them for the same reason, since their trio might be memorable even in a city like this.
"Last call." The dealer held a final stick over the board and Theo added in another Disc, trying not to think about the probability of losing everything. It was frustratingly high, but playing on high value sets like this was statistically optimal.
It landed with a red sigil up... completing the set. Across the table, Fiyu gave an audible sigh of disappointment and lowered her head, which distracted from the fact that Theo was raking in the entire pot and the set award from the dealer. Though the woman dealing cast him a slightly suspicious glance, she didn't say anything.
"Well, I should quit while my luck is good." Theo faked a laugh and levered to his feet, pretending to fumble a bit with the last Discs. That round had been worth nearly eighty Fithan Discs, his highest so far, putting his total gambling profits at nearly five hundred.
Half of what he needed to purchase the drysupernova. Though pushing harder at more gambling houses could have gotten him to the necessary sum in under a week, he judged it was best to stay cautious. Theo nodded to everyone except Fiyu, who looked deeply concerned, and stepped away from the table.
A hand settled onto his shoulder.
"We want to congratulate you on your victory, friend." There was a Fithan man standing behind him, but more importantly his hand was burning with a Ruler's cantae. It exerted no pressure, but guided him toward a side room instead of an exit. "Let us buy you a drink."
"Why not?" Theo laughed and went with them as if he was unaware it was a trap. If they were local thugs aiming to take his winnings, or just the gambling den's guards, Nauda wasn't far away and Fiyu would help. For now, best to play it cool.
As they walked toward the chamber and he got a better look at the people behind him, Theo suspected that they were not simply local soulcrafters. Two men and two women, all wearing nondescript robes that were expensively tailored. The worst case scenario would be if they were mercenaries hired by the Armeau family, intending to kill him before the duel with Esaire, but he thought it was more likely that they were representatives of a House. Given the circumstances, most likely...
"The House of Coin congratulates you." One of the women sat down on the opposite side of a low table, while the Ruler stayed at his back and encouraged him to sit. When he saw a stone plate with an elaborate golden seal, Theo slouched into the seat opposite her.
"You're not going to punish me for getting lucky, are you?" He intentionally held his soul stiff as he spoke, trying to make the words come out a bit garbled, as if he was a recent foreigner. All he got was cool stares from the cloaked group.
"There's no more need for that, Peanen of House Blacksilver." The woman folded her hands in front of her and gave him the most clinically precise smile he'd ever seen. "The House of Coin watches all of its establishments carefully for certain patterns of behavior, and we are as familiar with statistics as you are. You did well to evade notice for this many nights, but we are now certain."
Dropping the act, Theo met her gaze without blinking. "Nothing I've done is cheating." Not true, but he wasn't going to get Fiyu into any trouble, so he intended to deflect to his stick counting strategy. All he got was the same smile.
"You misunderstand me. Though we do intend to politely ask you to leave, we would like to congratulate you on your efficiency. If you were not already a member of House Blacksilver, we might invite you to work in our gambling division."
"I'm honored." While he mirrored her smile, Theo leaned back and considered his exits and whether or not he'd need to use them. "But since I can't, are we going to have a problem?"
"That is up to you." The woman set a stack of larger coins on the table and Theo realized that they were valued at exactly a hundred Fithan Discs. She slid them incrementally in his direction and gave that precise smile again. "Consider this a reward for your competence, and also a reminder not to return."
He hesitated before reaching out, half-expecting the Ruler to cut off his arm, but no one stopped him from collecting the money. That done, Theo rose carefully, beginning to believe that they really had no intention of doing anything more than threatening. Instead of leaving, he glanced over the entire group. "I suppose that's one way to do business."
"Business is indeed our concern. We do insist on maintaining certain monopolies, but for those who understand the nature of trade, mutual profit is generally ideal. Failing that, effective retaliation. Please have a pleasant day."
Realizing that his luck had been pressed much further than he'd thought, Theo left the room and then the gambling den. He found Nauda and Fiyu by the outside wall, Fiyu tracking him and Nauda looking like she intended to break through if there was a problem. When they looked to him apprehensively, he shook his head and jingled the sack of money.
"They caught on to what we were doing and politely asked us to leave. I suggest we do so."
"Not going to try again?" Nauda moved to walk alongside him as they left the neighborhood. "There are a lot of gambling dens in the city, and this has been earning you more money than anything else."
"Yes, but I don't want to cross them." Theo glanced back one more time, imagining golden eyes on his back. "I can deal with a blood vendetta from a noble family, but getting on the wrong side of merchants..."
Chapter 22
With the well of gambling profit dried up, Theo could only eye his total and hope the numbers worked out in the end.
He'd received his salary for another month, which took him a hundred and ten Fithan Discs closer. Some of his plans for Aathal had been deemed viable by House Blacksilver, but not as immediately profitable as the granitebile. Instead of a percentage, they'd given him flat payments. Combined with his ongoing income from the petalfilter work, that earned him roughly another two hundred.
So in all... only nine hundred. Over a hundred Fithan Discs short, which was no small sum.
Of course, he'd gain it in another month, but he was concerned that the drysupernova wouldn't be available by then. He almost considered gambling again, though challenging the House of Coin was clearly too risky. The others might have loaned him the money, yet he was already in their debt and they didn't have much, having purchased their own sublime materials.
One possibility was to begin selling off what assets they had, though it was a bad option that would cost them in the end. The Deuxan sleigh, for example, couldn't be easily replaced and saved them money each month. Nauda reminded him that they still had the eryo claws, which definitely had some value, but he wanted to save those for a time when he was truly desperate. His deadline might be highest priority, but a single sublime material wasn't worth losing irreplaceable assets.
If he had one skill developed on Earth, it was preventing depressing thoughts from overwhelming him completely. Despite falling short and feeling the increasing pressure, Theo didn't let up in his soulcrafting routine even slightly, throwing himself into every task he had available.
The most successful of those was his work soulcrafting a pure speed room. He'd researched the yellow crystals from the mine and discovered they were named, unsurprisingly, tornadogems. Imbued with wind as they were, they had a clear tie to concepts of speed and could definitely find a place in his soulhome.
For the f
irst time since his return, however, he found himself having to build the room to dampen the essence of a sublime material instead of enhance it. They simply generated too much wind, clashing with his gravitational concepts of mass and pressure. So instead of placing them on an altar, he'd built a box for them out of leftover eclipsebasalt. That had contained them far too well, however, storing them inertly.
In the end, he'd forced himself to purchase some glass with his House merits, though he didn't like dropping further from his goals there. He still needed well over a thousand merits total, and his recent activities had been less successful at acquiring those than earning money.
Once he forced himself, however, the chamber came together quickly. He built a hollow cube of eclipsebasalt, then replaced the four sides with dark window panes. The top was a lid, through which he poured all the tornadogems he'd collected from the quarry. Once shielded from the rest of his soulhome, they began to spin around one another, soon forming a tornado of cantae. Their force passed through the dark window panes and was transformed into a much more palatable energy.
It all would have been much easier and cheaper if Fiyu had been able to create the glass for him, but it wasn't an option and he was actually uncertain if it was even theoretically possible. Such matters had been at the very edge of his understanding when he'd been a Stronghold, so he held the rules he remembered lighter.
In any case, the glass worked well enough for now. He had the force of a tornado inside his soulhome, and he could strengthen it simply by acquiring more tornadogems. Still, whenever he had time, he did his best to carve the walls of the room into a proper speed chamber.
He could definitely feel the results, able to move much more swiftly than he had before. When he tried sparring with Nauda, her enhanced speed was no longer overwhelming, but he still wasn't satisfied. Even if Nauda was as fast as Esaire had been before, he'd be even faster by the time of their duel. The speed chamber was a good start, but he needed more.
Which just brought him around to the same old flaw: his second floor chambers would work more efficiently if he could move his singularity upward. To do that, he needed the drysupernova, and that required the money he didn't have.
Eventually, after another mundane assignment, he realized that he needed to relax if he was going to think of a breakthrough. That had always been one of his greatest flaws, in a sense: he'd been so focused on gaining strength that he'd missed Vistgil's schemes, then so obsessed with returning to the Nine that he'd lived a miserable life on Earth. It seemed efficient only through tunnel vision, but with perspective he could see that it limited him in the end.
So instead of continuing to be unsociable, he found Nauda when she wasn't working and they both went to Fiyu's room. House Blacksilver had windowless rooms designed for Ichili, and Fiyu had customized hers since they arrived, reinforcing the door to reduce sounds and veiling all the lights. Only when checking to make sure Senka wasn't underfoot did Theo realize that he hadn't seen her recently.
"How are you, Theo?" Fiyu had been soulcrafting, but emerged to smile at him. He could only shrug.
"I need to think about something other than soulcrafting. What have the two of you been doing?"
"Mostly soulcrafting," Nauda said, but Fiyu regarded him seriously.
"I have a question, Theo. If soulcrafters do not exist on Earth, what was your profession? Were you a gambler?"
Theo coughed in surprise, struggling not to laugh. No, the only gambling he'd done had been preparation for a return, not trying to run any serious operations. "No, I wasn't a professional gambler. Honestly, I wasn't much of anything. It's not a very interesting time of my life, even though it's the majority of my life."
"It would be interesting to me." Fiyu continued staring, and he swore he could feel a supernatural sense flowing over him. "Your world seems strange to me, more strange than any one of the Nine Worlds. It is okay if you do not want to speak of it too much, but could you tell us what you did for a living?"
As the two of them watched him, Theo realized that this was very nearly a first. In his first life - no, he kept falling into that pattern, and it led him to make the wrong separations. Of all the people he had met on his journey through the Nine, essentially none had asked him much about his home. They'd treated him as if he was a brand new person, without a world that would be strange and exotic to them.
Yet he remembered his friends, and they had been vibrantly curious people. He wondered if perhaps he had been the one who had caused it, wanting to forget that he had ever lived elsewhere and exist wholly in a new life. But his silence had stretched on for too long, and they deserved an answer.
"I was an operations manager." When they both blinked at him, clearly not having heard the words he intended, he tried again. "Imagine an organization larger than a House, employing many more people and selling products over a much larger area. When a structure becomes that big, you can't just have a few leaders deciding everything. My job was managing supply chains, supervising the work of others, and maintaining quality."
Nauda stared at him with an unreadable expression and eventually shook her head. "Well, that might explain a few things about you."
"I think I understand the purpose," Fiyu said, "but I cannot imagine what your actual work would have been. Did you enjoy it?"
Theo snorted. "Not at all. At first, I was convinced that I was going back to the Nine Worlds at any moment, so I wasted my early years. When I realized it might be a long time, I took stable jobs that supported me and let me travel. It paid well enough, so I could explore my world, hoping to find a place close enough to the Nine Worlds to have a door back."
"I see." Fiyu bobbed her head as if pleased with his answer, though he thought it was a terrible one. Meanwhile, Nauda balanced her staff across her legs and tilted it back and forth, eventually coming up with a question.
"So what happens to that money, back on your world?"
"It probably stays in the bank, where I left it." Thinking about such details felt deeply wrong to him, somehow, as if he should have abandoned that life entirely. Instead of flinching away from the thoughts, as he often had, he pushed harder. That was part of his life, and ignoring it would cost him.
"And to your friends, you just disappeared?"
"Hah, as if I had real friends. If anyone thought about me, they probably assumed that I just cut them off."
Fiyu shook her head. "That is sad. It is good that you were able to return to the Nine Worlds."
"I hope it is." For a while he sat back and reflected on that, wondering just how they were connected. A very long time ago, Vistgil had spoken to him as if his old life had ended, an irrelevant prologue before his true life began.
Now it was clear that those words had been meant to manipulate him, but how? Vistgil must need people from Earth for some reason, which meant he had to keep them ignorant. The problem was, Theo couldn't think of anything he'd done before that was so important that someone else couldn't have done it. Surely someone as powerful as Vistgil could do his own dirty work. What he needed to remember was that Earth did matter, somehow, or there wouldn't be traps set up to destroy him.
Realizing that he'd fallen into his thoughts again, Theo smiled at both of them. "One thing I can say: I'm glad I'm here, and I'm glad I met you. This is my third shot at life, and I'd like to get it right this time."
Nauda smiled and touched his arm. Fiyu bobbed her head pleasantly. Senka slid out from underneath the bed and screeched, "Senka too, Senka too!"
All of them flinched in surprise, and Theo very nearly flattened her into a puddle. Not out of panic, but because he really didn't want to deal with her at the moment. Before he could decide whether or not to do it anyway, Senka suddenly thrust a large sack against his chest.
"Senka stole this for you!"
He looked down to see what junk she'd taken this time, hoping that it contained some money or items of decent value. But to his surprise, the entire sack was filled with Fithan Discs, not
a single piece of trash in sight. After quickly calculating the value at over a hundred total, he looked up to Senka, only to find her staring at him with unusual intensity.
"Senka doesn't want you to hate Senka. Senka isn't a Senkahead all the time."
Theo met her gaze, wondering if there was really something there. "Senka, you..."
"Sporp!" She abruptly flopped backwards against Nauda's legs, then tried to chew on the end of her staff. When Nauda pulled it away, she began to thrash on her back and wail. The abrupt shift left all of them staring at her, not quite sure how to take it.
In the end, Theo hefted the sack. "There's enough here. If you meant to do that, Senka, thank you."
"Give Senka yummies right now!"
While Fiyu tried to console her, Nauda instead stepped closer. "Are you going to buy it tomorrow, or...?"
"Right now." He saw her expression and grinned in response. "I might have worked a very boring job, but I know something about doing things efficiently. If this works out, I'll be unsociable again for a while."
"Just so long as you keep your ultimate goals in mind."
She let him go, so Theo rushed to take the sleigh. A cynical part of his mind was convinced that the drysupernova would have been purchased just before he arrived, or someone would attack him on the way, or Vistgil himself would descend from the sky. None of those happened: he simply walked into the store, purchased the drysupernova from a polite clerk, and left.
He toyed with it all the way back, marveling at the power burning within. Though he was certain it would fulfill its most basic purpose, he wasn't sure how much of the cantae would be lost in the process. This was one of the points of his blueprint he wasn't completely satisfied with, since he'd been dependent on Brigana's design for a core and was trying to rework from first principles.
Back in the Blacksilver complex, he locked his door and practically leapt into his soulhome. It actually hadn't been so long since he'd been forcing work on his speed chamber, exhausted, yet the short time with the others left him rejuvenated. That, and the potential for a breakthrough.
