Jenny grumbled a little, but Alyssa was surprisingly ready to pay Sharp for the assistance. "Five hundred," she said.
"That's a little low," Sharp replied.
"It's a job you're double-dipping on," Alyssa replied.
"Yeah, but the other side is paying me in full," Sharp replied. "And I'm not telling them about you at all, so it feels only fair that you pay me a little more."
"Greedy," Jenny replied.
Alyssa sighed. "A thousand, then, but not any more than that."
Sharp eyed her for a moment, then nodded. "A thousand... for me. What about for my cat? She's an expert you know, so she should get a cut of the pay as well."
"We're not paying your cat," Jenny snapped. "I don't care if it's the Cat Eidolon's favourite mask-wearing tabby, it's your cat, so you can pay it. Besides, what does a cat even want payment in?"
"Love and affection?" Sharp asked.
"Cash USD. Preferably through untraceable bills or a direct bank payment," I said.
Sharp shook her head. "Fine. I'll take care of Regent Meow Meow von Meow. And I suppose I should take care of you two as well, since you're not my clients." Sharp had a small backpack on, but she slung it off and reached inside, then she pulled out a mask not too dissimilar to her own and tossed it to Jenny who fumbled it out of the air. Another went to Alyssa.
"You had extra masks with you?" Jenny asked.
"I told you I was prepping for this mission, not just going on it without being ready yet," Sharp said. "Wait, I have more stuff." She reached in and pulled out a small, compressed plastic bag, it was about a foot by a foot and rather thin. The label on the front had an image of a generic-looking man in full body PPE. "Here, I have three of these, so we might as well share."
I hadn't considered using her Pockets power for that, but I supposed that PPE technically counted as a tool, of sorts. Or maybe it was just tool-adjacent enough to count? She was able to summon up gloves and masks, which I suppose only fit the definition of 'tool' if it was stretched a little.
"Well shit," Jenny said as she ripped the bag open and unfurled the suit within. It looked to be sized for Sharp, so rather large for her, but it was PPE. Those kinds of things were never exactly tailored properly at the best of times.
Sharp grinned. "I'm useful to have around, you know?" She shucked off her courier's jacket, then her boots, and started to squirm into one of the PPE suits. It was a pale bluish colour and made of a sort of swishy plastic that I immediately hated the feel of.
Alyssa stared at hers for a while before sighing and slipping into the suit. It really didn't fit her new-age hippie vibes, but I think she understood the worth of not having her normal clothes smell like sewers so much.
Once they were all dressed and I'd found my way back to Sharp's shoulder, Sharp took a moment to retie her boots while talking to the girls. "So, did you guys have an idea of how to get to the place we're trying to reach? I hadn't had time to find a map and all that yet."
"We have an idea," Jenny replied. "I bought a map off of a Mute I know. It's not the best, but they know the slimier parts of the city better than almost anyone, even the city itself."
"That's a little weird," Sharp said. "You'd think the city would know? I mean... we're in a maintenance room, it has to belong to someone?"
"They would, only the information is often scrubbed," Alyssa replied. "A lot of gangs and corporations have good reasons to want to avoid having their locational data easily available. It's a problem every time there's an issue because the only people who know where things are are older workers."
Sharp shrugged. "Well, okay. I'll trust your map, then. Lead the way?"
Sharp pulled out a small headlamp with straps from a side pocket of her backpack then fit it on her head. She turned it on with a flick and scanned the light across the room.
"Right, let's go," Jenny said.
We stepped out of the maintenance room and back into the tunnels. I opted to walk alongside Sharp on the ground. The grated floors were far from comfortable to walk on, but they weren't that bad, and it gave me a bit more freedom with my movements.
Jenny consulted her phone, then pointed off to the right. "That way. C'mon, we have a long ways to go. We're walking a few miles down here, for sure."
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"I can do that," Sharp said. "I've been working out." She flexed a bicep, then very obviously glanced over at Alyssa to see if the woman would react, but there wasn't even a twitch of notice on her part.
Probably for the best. If anyone fell for Sharp's... 'charms' then they were probably not smart enough as a person to be worth keeping around.
The passage Jenny led us through eventually turned down into a tunnel, and soon enough Sharp had to pick the lock of another door to give us access into a maintenance tunnel that felt like it went on forever.
"This should be running over the storm drains," Jenny said as she looked to her phone. She shook it a bit, then swore. "Man, I bought this phone because it was supposed to work anywhere."
"I don't think 'anywhere' includes tunnels underground," Alyssa said.
"Yes it does, that's literally the definition of anywhere," Jenny shot back. "I have the map saved, but I was counting on the GPS letting me know where we were on that map. I think we're... here, this long ass passage leading in the city." She traced something with a finger. "And we need to continue for... a while, until we reach 105G."
"Are there any people who hang out in these tunnels?" Sharp asked.
The corridor we were in was deserted. The only signs of recent human habitation were rubber skid marks on the floor from pallet jacks and maybe a few cigarette butts.
Eventually we reached the door that Jenny was talking about, and pushed through, then it became a confusing mess of turns, locked doors, and doubling back whenever Jenny misread her map.
"I should have bought better mapping software," Jenny complained after what must have been a solid hour of wandering around. I was pretty sure we'd gone in a circle three times before Jenny finally found the right stairwell leading us deeper into the undercity's system.
On the more positive side, we had encountered a few entrances into the lower levels of some megabuildings. Never the correct one, of course, but it at least proved that they existed.
Finding the correct one, however, was going to be difficult. "We should be super close," Jenny said. "Look, there's supposed to be a passage right here."
She pointed ahead, and the group walked over slowly and stopped in front of a wall. A very bricked-in wall, where the cinder blocks didn't quite align with the others around them.
"Wait, did they block off all of the underground access like this?" Sharp asked.
Alyssa poked at the wall. "No way of knowing if this was recent. It could be, I suppose."
"Let me try something," Alyssa said. She reached for her waist, then sighed when she encountered the PPE. A half minute of her unzipping the front and rooting around later, and she returned with a small butterfly pendant that she held up before the wall.
"Oh, magic," Sharp muttered. I could almost feel her attention sharpening. Though to be fair, mine did the same.
Alyss muttered something under her breath, an incantation that I couldn't quite pick up, not that I expected to be able to decipher anything of the sort. The pendant started to sway from side to side, then it glowed faintly before a tiny moth, the same size and shape as the one on the pendant itself, peeled off the emblem and flew right into and through the wall.
Alyssa slowly knelt down and tilted her head down, adopting a meditative pose. "Is she okay?" Sharp asked.
"Give her a minute or two," Jenny said. "I've seen this trick before."
"It's a spell," Alyssa muttered, her eyes still closed. "Not a trick. And please remain quiet, I'm working here."
Jenny shrugged, and Sharp nodded back. Both of them remained blissfully quiet for a minute, and then two, and then three. Finally, the wispy moth returned, looking a little fainter then before, and it reentered the pendant.
Alyssa opened her eyes and let out a long sigh as she tucked the pendant away. "It's around here," she said. "Through this wall and a corridor away. They blocked off all the other ways in, as far as I can tell. Ripped out some of the signage too, but there was an electrical box that had the megabuilding's number on it. This is the right place."
"Cool," Sharp said. She eyed the cinder block wall. "Uh, you guys didn't happen to bring sledge hammers?"
"Let's not pull that out of your pocket. There's only so much you can stretch credibility."
***
If you like this story, you should check out my newest fic! No Strings Attached! It's a bit darker than my usual fare, a story inspired by Bloodborne and Elden Ring, taking place in a fantasy world recently ruled by great dragons who have all fallen victim to a mysterious plague!
LINK!
The dragons are dead. Their colossal forms, once the lifeblood of an empire, now rot in the wastelands of a cursed continent. The people they empowered—humans made unnaturally strong by dragonkind's gifts—have been driven to madness by their absence. The land festers, shrouded in mystery, death, and a creeping decay that no living being dares approach.
Magus Montgomery Maldrak is no stranger to impossible odds. Driven by curiosity and a desperate need to save his daughter lost on the decaying continent of Draya Calyrex, he crafts a solution that skirts the very edge of life and death: puppet-automatons animated by necromantic sorcery. Through their lifeless eyes, Maldrak will walk the ruins of a dead empire, searching for the truth behind the plague, the madness, and the dragons' fall. Yet some truths are meant to stay buried—and some lands are better left forgotten.
What to expect:
A post-apocalyptic world
Magic going wild
Puppets
Transhumanism
Cute puppet girls?
A boatload of Elden Ring and Bloodborne inspired stuff.
Daily updates until chapter 40, after that... we'll see!