Lillene

Enjoy!

Rose grinned as he walked towards Minu and Serenity. “I wondered if I’d see you here or if I’d have to pick you up then catch a cat. I already have an order for a tamed talmis, but if you want to pay the tamed price for her, I can make an exception for you.”

That sounded an awful lot like “I’m going to charge you extra for cutting in line.” Serenity wasn’t certain there actually was a line, but it still gave him something to work with. He took a close look at Rose; there were no overt signs of Night Fire. He did smell a bit like several demons, but that was easily explained by the fact that he sold demons.

Children of Passion. It was going to be hard to remember to use the new term, but Serenity needed to try. If nothing else, it meant he wouldn’t have to call himself a demon. He could easily say that he was passionate, even emotional, about some things.

Serenity pushed the naming convention to the side once more. Minu was important right now, not what he called her. “What is that price?”

Rose smiled warmly. “The price the other buyer and I agreed on is $5000. That’s for a talmis with minimal training, basically just enough to be mostly safe around a small group. I prefer to work with new owners for a while after they buy a tamed creature, so that we can be certain the creature understands its owner and will reliably obey, as well as establishing ground rules for when and how to fight.” Rose paused for a moment, then seemed to shrug to himself. “I’ve never trained a talmis to be ridden, though; that one’s new to me.”

Serenity blinked at the price. Either his scale was seriously off or tamers really should gather and train their animals themselves if they were not all that well off. Yes, a delver could make enough to cover that cost, but they’d need to be delving regularly and put all of their profit towards a beast for several months to afford that. It was entirely possible that part of the reason was that Minu was roughly Tier Two, but Serenity was pretty certain that price would be hard for a Tier Three delver to meet, much less one at Tier Two. Even with better training costing extra, it would probably pay for itself in the long run - if the trained beast survived.

At the minimum, it told Serenity that the demons weren’t being released to be used as cannon fodder and they weren’t so common that the price had cratered. On the other hand, they were common enough that Rose was confident he could find a replacement to train fairly quickly for another buyer, that wasn’t really a good sign.

It might mean that someone was carefully watching how many were introduced. Equally likely, the limit could be the training; there couldn’t be that many monster trainers out there after only three years, could there?

He should have brought someone who could tell him more about the deeper meaning behind Rose’s offer. As it was, he’d just have to take it at face value. Five thousand for Minu seemed reasonable; if nothing else, he could give her to Aki. 

With that out of the way, Serenity returned to the actual reason he was here. It wasn’t to buy a cat, even though it seemed like that was what he was about to do. “Tell me something about her past. Where do you get talmis?”

“You want to know where we get our monsters?” Rose didn’t seem happy about that. Serenity noticed that his accent was no longer wavering all over the place; instead, it had settled into a very bland TV-American accent. 

“Some of them,” Serenity agreed. “The ones that aren’t native to Earth. Monster or not, I need to know where you’re getting them because I need to talk to the supplier.”

Rose shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they’re capturing talmis from a dungeon somewhere, but they don’t talk about it. They won’t deal with you, anyway; they have very strict restrictions on who they’ll work with. Roughly half of the equipment you see here is to meet Locust’s requirements for the monsters and animals they sell, and they’re extremely strict about it. I have to meet regular inspections. That’s why I can safely say that however they’re sourced, it’s with a great deal of care for the animal and monster.” Rose paused for a moment. “They also never arrive injured or ill; they’ve always been well cared for as far as our on-site vet can tell.”

If they were summoned right before they were delivered, “never injured or ill” was easy to explain. Even more interesting was the mention of regular inspections. That gave Serenity an option he hadn’t thought of: could he simply meet the inspector here and get an in that way? It might be easier than trying to cold call a company he didn’t know.

Wait, Locust? That name rang a bell somewhere.

“Locust Holdings is the name of the company that was paying Mr. Michaelson to buy land,” Aide informed Serenity. Sometimes it was really convenient to have a memory backup who was good at finding things quickly.

“What’s Locust’s full name?” He doubted it would be Locust Holdings. That would be too obvious. Getting the name would help Russ dig into it.

Could Russ even look into it? This wasn’t really part of the investigation into the real estate stuff, and Serenity didn’t know how that all worked. Well, at least he could ask, and having the name wouldn’t hurt. Maybe Rissa would know how to look into it. For that matter, Janice might know; she was her father’s go-to person. He’d probably been underutilizing her, though she didn’t seem at all bothered by it.

“Locust Farms,” Rose stated. “They’re exclusively a supplier to pet stores and monster taming establishments. One of the best, at least among the monster suppliers.”

“When will their inspector next be coming by?” Serenity reached up to scratch Minu under the chin. She’d just started to whine for attention and that seemed like a good thing to try, given her posture. It reminded Serenity of Curio’s when he wanted chin scratches but was too proud to ask for them, though Curio was quieter.

Rose took a moment to look at Serenity and Minu. “Why don’t we take the time to finalize the sale first, and perhaps talk about the price for taming lessons?”

Serenity wasn’t sure why Rose didn’t just ask for more money for the information, but even he could recognize what was happening here.

The next Locust inspection at Rosemont’s place wouldn’t be for another two weeks, so Serenity needed to go ahead with the other plans. He couldn’t count on any one thing being the solution, after all. That evening, Serenity left Minu in Raz’s somewhat annoyed care while he went out to look into the other houses with ley lines. He wanted to confirm his findings.

As far as he could tell without digging up the crystals, all of the other locations had a quartz crystal stabilizing a minor ley line node somewhere on or near the property. They all felt extremely similar, close enough that Serenity didn’t think he’d learn anything by digging up the crystal. He might learn something from breaking one, but he wasn’t confident he’d learn enough to have it be worth tipping his hand that he was aware of the ritual layout. 

The one new piece of information he obtained was that the quartz crystals weren’t just in different locations compared to the property’s layout; they didn’t even have to be close to the center at all. Two of them were actually only barely on the house’s side of the property line; there was another that Serenity wasn’t certain about, but he thought it was actually on the other side of the property line. 

That implied the ritual only needed the node to be partly within the property, not the crystalline anchor. Serenity wasn’t certain what effect that would have on the ritual itself. It had some implications for what Concepts would be required to make a ritual work, but even though “ownership” wasn’t a property that tended to be particularly relevant to Serenity’s magic, he knew that there were a lot of Affinities and Concepts that used it as a key element. It wasn’t anything close to definitive.

Gaia had said she’d handle the dungeons, so he didn’t need to worry about them unless Gaia was unable to talk them into helping. He only needed to worry about the other two nodes. 

That meant his next step was to head back to A’Atla. He wanted to figure out how to move the ley lines and that meant he needed World Core crystal. It wasn’t what the Voice used, but Serenity didn’t know how to get more of that, whether it was dungeon crystal or something like the Crystal Seed he was given. It also wasn’t what Apollyon apparently used, but Serenity suspected Apollyon would have used World Core crystal if he had it. It seemed far more suitable to the task of creating and maintaining a ley line nexus than simple quartz.

The most obvious place on A’Atla to get World Core crystal was the mountain that was made of it, the mountain that was once a satellite of the planet and was now a dungeon covered in demons. Since it was also the anchoring point for the nexus that A’Atla floated inside, Serenity didn’t want to disturb it.

Huh. Now that he thought about it, he had sort of created a nexus anchor point before, hadn’t he? That wasn’t a set of circumstances he could repeat; even if he could, he didn’t want to. It was still reassuring to know that he’d actually accomplished the task before on a far larger scale.

Instead of the mountain, Serenity wanted to get World Core crystal by picking up some of the broken bits of “rock” that littered the surface of the island, especially near the mountain. All he had to do was travel from the portal down the mountain slope to outside the dungeon, then search for a while. 

The biggest problem turned out to be that most of the chunks Serenity found were far too large. He didn’t need a two foot in diameter broken amorphous blob of World Core crystal; he needed something that was closer to three or four inches in diameter. It was hard to be certain, but he was sure that would be more than big enough; World Core crystal was far more suited to this than quartz.

After the first dozen mini boulders, Serenity started tossing them in his Rift even though he didn’t need them now. World Core crystal was amazing stuff; there was no reason to just leave it lying around. 

After most of a day of harvesting World Core crystal, he met with his parents for dinner. He had what he needed, but that was no reason not to stop by and visit his family. He invited Rissa, but she wasn’t able to make it; her only explanation was angry face money angry face, so he knew he’d have to catch her when she was feeling a bit less annoyed for a proper explanation. 

Unlike Rissa, Serenity’s parents were in a great mood. Lex had apparently found a collection of metal sheets inscribed with the A’Atlan language. It hadn’t been translated yet, but they were riding high from the discovery.

Lillene

It’s unlikely that Rissa is mad about Serenity’s purchase of Minu, so Serenity has no idea what’s gone wrong.