The rest of our fishing trip went off pretty smoothly. All in all, I think it took just over an hour. She ended up catching half a dozen fish by the end of it. Half a dozen of the same fish, at that. Small, scaly masses of a terrible shade of brown with splotches of vomit green plastered in without reason or order, their disgusting, dead eyes protruding out of their slime ridden corpses, staring at everything or nothing at all. Looking all wonky for no reason. Oh, and they terrible, too.  

Eweh. Fish are gross. Bleh.

I gagged as I took another look at the pile of fish. Somehow, looking at them makes the smell worse. 

"Heh. Weak." The immortal, er, 'Sis' joked, putting the sword hilt back on her fishing rod. Should I still refer to her as 'Sis' in my thoughts? Or is that weird? I mean, the situation's a little weird regardless, honestly, but does this make it weirder? 

Eh, 'Sis' has less syllables. I'll just go with that. It sounds silly, but you never know when thinking 3 syllables more efficiently is gonna come in handy. Probably. 

Also, "Rude." I said, in regards to that earlier remark. "Anyways, what is it we needed to do with these, again?" I asked. 

"Well," Sis began, pulling a small wooden tube out of one of her vest pockets, and setting it aside. "First, we separate the valuable ones from the volatile ones." 

"Oh, yeah." I said, taking a step back, deciding that I'll just help from over here, yeah. That's a good idea. 

Sis reached for the disgusting pile of fish, and rearranged them into a disgusting line of fish, before wordlessly staring at them for some time.

...

Really intently. 

It was kinda weird.

Anyways, after that, she organized them into 2 groups. One with 2 disgusting fish, and one with 4 of them. I couldn't tell the difference between any of them, they all looked the same to me. I wonder if S would be able to differentiate between them? I bet he'd say something like 'Right, this one smells like violence." or something like that. 

Heh... Yeah...

...

Presumably, one pile is the good fish, and the bad ideas waiting to happen. 

She nodded at her handiwork, and pulled out the sheet of paper from the guild hall, and glanced up and down from it for a while. 

"Yep. Knew it." She said, obviously quite satisfied with herself, as she crumpled up the page and stuffed it away once more. "Well, now that that's out of the way..." One after another, she picked up and threw the fish in the larger pile back into the water. One of them blew up midair. I'll spare the details, but I will say this: I will be seeing that in my nightmares.  

"Whoops." Sis said as the explosion occurred, before shrugging and gazing back down at the remaining fish. She reached for the wooden tube, and twisted it and pulled the top half off, revealing a small, freakishly sharp, and weirdly curvy knife, stored safely in some fluffy stuff. Well, it revealed the handle, at least. Not like she stored it with the blade sticking out. That'd be unsafe. Always store blades with the handles pointing outside, towards you. That's food safety 101. 

And then she began putting that knife to work. Once again, I'll be leaving out most of the details (partially because I found myself looking away and covering my eyes), but I can say this: She's pretty dang efficient with that knife. The only hiccup in the process was uncrumpling the page from earlier to make sure she had harvested all the right parts. 

Speaking of, who the heck decided to put out such a high reward for rare fish organs? What use could these possibly have? Some sort of obscure form of sushi or something? Maybe it's, like, potion ingredients. They used pretty weird ingredients in those old fairy tales, right? That'd make sense. Or, maybe, someone just has some really strange hobbies.

I'd rather not consider that possibility, actually. 

Anyways, it didn't take long for Sis to be done with her work. "Alright, think that's everything." She said, holding up the little cloth baggie that held all sorts of disgusting, slimey animal parts like it's nothing. "Let's head back."

"Uh, what about those?" I said, pointing over to the fish corpses which were, at this point, looking 'a little worse for wear', to say the least.

"Oh yeah, good point." She said, picking them up barehanded and tossing them into the water, like it was the easiest and most natural thing in the world. 

"...  Let's head back." I said, putting my hands together. 

I dropped us into that same convenient alleyway we came from. Man, I love this alleyway. Ehk, was that weird.

Actually, so is the alleyway itself, now that I'm thinking about it. I mean, it's a dead end, and it doesn't lead anywhere, there's no entrances or even windows or anything here. Not even, like, a sewer grate or something. Odd.

Anyways, we made our way back to the guild hall. 

This time, the place was empty, aside from the people manning the desks, of course. 

I paused, for a moment. I had to steel myself for what I was about to do.

I wasn't gonna be proud of this, but there are some things a man has to do. 

Deep breath... Okay, here's the plan : First, very quickly, when Sis isn't looking, I'll summon the holes. One in my toolbox back in Basenholm, and one really small one, right here, that I'll hold on the tip of my pointer finger. Once I get the money, real subtly, I'll reach my hand in, and pretend to count the coins. As I'm doing that, I slip just a couple of them into the hole, and they fall into the box, real smooth and easy. But I'll need to consider that there's a possibility the sound of the metal coin and metal box clanking will be audible, so I need to have the exit hole be precisely placed so that the noise created is minimal. At absolute worst, I'll have to feign a cough or a sneeze or something like that to mask the noise. Then, assuming everything goes off without a hitch, I confidently hand Sis the money, and confidently saying 'Yep, it's all there.' Hopefully, my feigned confidence will be -

"Bro, you awake?" Sis asked, abruptly derailing my thoughts. 

"Eh, erm, ah, yeah. Yep. Now, let's get the-" I began, before I noticed that the bag Sis was previously holding is now sitting on the desk, being eyed by a very disgusted looking guild attendant dude, who seems quite reluctant to relocate it. The bag Sis was currently holding was smaller, and a lot heavier looking.

"Anyways, here." She said, holding the bag out to me.

Wait, what? Hold on, that's not- "Uh... Wha?"

"The money, idiot. Take the money." 

"But I didn't do anything." I said, like an idiot, instead of just accepting the cash.

"What am I gonna use money for?" She asked, as if she was saying the most obvious thing in the world. 

... Uh... That's.... "Uh... if you wanna, like, do... Stuff?" 

"Like what? Eat? Sleep?"

"There's other stuff you could buy." 

"I have all the fishing gear I'll need, and this world has libraries. Just take the money."

"But... I'll feel bad."

She pinched the top of her nose and squinted. "Tell ya what. Take the money, use it for stuff you need, and, in the off chance I want something, you can just buy it for me. To me, this stuff is just metal junk. You'll be doing me a service by taking it. Just take it." She explained.

"... Fine." I said. I still feel a little bad about it, but she was kinda patronizing me just now, so I don't feel as bad. Still kinda bad though. 

I put the money in my coin pouch, and, once again, I have a pretty good amount of cash. I'll try to be less reckless this time. 

I'll still allow myself to have a few colas, though. It's only reasonable. 

"So, what're we doing next?" Sis asked as we left the guild hall.

"Eh, I've got some errands to run, if you don't mind tagging along." 

She shrugged. "I've nothing better to do, I guess." She said.