Chapter Twelve - Rich

"Alright, you'll have to explain that one," Alice said. "What makes these Stalkers rich? Isn't the Zone just a... dangerous area, with dangerous magical effects?"

Pavlo tapped his fingers on the little table on his side of the fence. "How do I put this," he said. "Ah! I know."

The big man turned and walked off towards the back of his room. There were crates and boxes covering the shelves there, and he started to tug some out to look within before pushing them back into place. He was clearly looking for something, though it took him some time to find it.

"Hah! Knew it was back here somewhere," he said before returning to the front with a small box. He opened it, then pulled out... a rather ratty yo-yo. It was made of bright plastic, with a few stickers slapped onto it by an unsteady hand, and it looked like it had been left in the dirt for a while.

It was the kind of thing that Alice wouldn't have been surprised to find abandoned in a playground, and it was very much not what she was expecting Pavlo to pull out. She could feel something from it, though. A faint magical pull.

"Now, I need you to watch me, very carefully," he said. "This is no toy, and this is no joke. Look, and try not to blink."

Pavlo fixed the yo-yo's loop around a finger, then as Alice and Crystal watched, he let it drop.

She followed it until it went all the way down and he gave it a tug. It sped back up, slapped into his palm and--

"Oh!" Crystal said.

Pavlo had disappeared.

Alice frowned and pushed her senses forwards to the space he had occupied. He was gone, not merely invisible. She has felt his fear, his presence, disappear in an instant. So not short-ranged teleportation, and not invisibility.

Crystal was looking behind herself for something, but she turned back just in time for Pavlo to reappear. "Ah... did it work?" he asked.

"You disappeared," Alice said matter-of-factly. "It was a temporal effect, I think."

He nodded, then pulled the loop off of his finger and replaced the yo-yo. "This old thing has been with me for a while. No real use for it, since the only way to trigger the effect is to bring it back up, and you're not aware of being gone when you use it. Even if you could use it in a fight, it'd be damned near useless. But not every trinket we pull from the Zone is like that."

"Are there a lot of things like that in the Zone?" Crystal asked.

"Plenty! If you know where to look." Pavlo tapped the side of his nose. "And Pavlo always knows where to look."

"Interesting," Alice said. "How much are these worth?"

"Depends a lot on what sort of thing they do," Pavlo said. "A trinket that pulls you ahead in time by four point two three seconds every time you trigger it? A few thousand rubles, maybe. It's a great curiosity. A machine that makes you younger? One that allows you to slow time around you? A machine that brings the dead back to life? These things can be priceless. There are plenty of ex-Stalkers in the greater world, living on yachts and surrounded by bea-- by nice things, who got there because they found the right thing, and the right buyer."

Alice nodded slowly. She could well imagine how giving people some smaller, weaker versions of any of her or her friend's powers could well have the entire world change. If they all came from the same place, then that place would be a figurative gold mine. "Is there only one Zone?"

Pavlo hummed, then reached to the side and pulled out a tube. He extracted a rolled up map from within, and pressed it flat on his table. "This," he said as he put his finger on a spot. "Is Pripyat." He ran his finger along a dotted red line around the city, down a ways south, then back up again. "And this is the centre of the Zone."

"Uh... isn't that where we are now?" Crystal asked.

"Welcome to the Zone!" Pavlo said with good cheer. "Yes, we're within it now. You might find trinkets just outside of the walls. Or within them. But you're unlikely to be that lucky. The storms start close to here, to the west, in the Other Pripyat."

"I'm confused," Crystal admitted. "How big is the Zone?"

Pavlo blinked, then stuffed the map away. He pulled out another, this one less detailed, but as zoomed out as a map could be. It was of the entire world. "The storms start here," he said, pointing to Ukraine. "They flow down here, then across the continent. Then across the ocean where they cut across the Americas. Then back up and spread out across Europe and some of Africa."

Alice leaned forwards and started at the map. "Are you saying that this Zone is global?"

"No, but the storms that start here are. They become... diluted. Like a drop of kvass in a tall glass of water. Not even enough to give you a taste. Here, it is pure. Across the world? Less so."

"If this is global, then..." Alice paused. She wasn't sure where to even begin sorting through the implications. There were a lot. More than that, she noticed that his map was strange. She would have to turn it over and study it more carefully, but Europe wasn't how she remembered it being. A glance at the corner of the map showed that it was printed in 1997, in Belarus. "Nevermind."

"So! Do you know anyone that could help us?" Crystal asked. "We can more or less point in the direction we need to go, but we'd love a guide to help us."

Pavlo hummed. "I might be able to help. And I might not. My time is precious, though I don't mind a bit of chatting now and then. The time of the people that would be willing to help... that's more precious still. The Last Resort is just a normal bar, you see. If some of our clients are of a certain type, then that's a coincidence."

He was side-stepping the issue. Now, more than ever, Alice felt like they needed a local guide. Or at least someone she could grill with questions. What they needed to convince Pavlo, she bet, was money.

The issue was getting it. This wasn't her Earth, where any of the magical girls had access to near infinite wealth. This was a place where she didn't have a Real to her name.

"Here, would this work?" Crystal asked as she put something in the small opening in the fence. It clunked onto Pavlo's table, and both her and Alice stared at it.

The device was... a small crystal, about the size of a thumb. Not any precious gem that Alice could tell. It was even a little... dirty, uneven, with some rocky substance stuck to it.

"What is this?" Pavlo asked without reaching for the crystal.

"If you put it in water, it'll double in size once an hour," Crystal said with a proud smile.

Alice blinked. Had... had Crystal just made that? It wasn't beyond her, of course. In fact, it was a pretty mundane use of her magic, but still.

"Interesting," Pavlo said. "It doesn't look precious."

"It's amethyst," Crystal said. "Not the kind of stone you'd make the prettier jewellery from, but I still think it's pretty."

Pavlo hummed, then left the desk for a moment. He returned quickly enough, with a tin cup half-full of dirty water, and a pair of thick gloves. He gingerly picked up the little trinket Crystal had made, and plopped it into the water.

The cup jumped as the crystal grew within.

"Interesting," he said.

"The growth won't clone itself," Crystal said. "And I'm pretty sure it's not exponential, so no worries about destroying the world if you drop it in the ocean or something!"

"Hmm," he replied. "Not the most useful of items."

Alice stood a little taller. "It's gemstone. It's infinite gemstone. Not diamond or anything too precious like that, but still. This is a Re--ruble printing machine for anyone who has a bit of patience."

"I see what you mean," he replied. "Did you find this yourselves?"

"Yup!" Crystal replied.

"Good find, good find. Yes, this is something that I'd be willing to help you for. You've come to the right place. Pavlo will give you a deal you won't regret making."

"What sort of deal?" Alice asked.

"Why, Koschei back there just so happens to be on his way to visit a little camp where you might meet some friends. I'll write you a letter. You said you were looking for a guide? You'll have the very best, with Pavlo's own recommendation. You'll have to pay for their services yourself, but you'll have found the right people, which is more than half the battle."

***