Chapter Fifty-Nine - Get Rich

Chapter Fifty-Nine - Get Rich I woke up the next morning full of vim and vigor and... yeah, I felt pretty good. I had a lot on my docket for the day. Sundays were nice and long, but I knew more or less what I had to accomplish by the end of the day. By the day's end, I wanted to contact Miss Ojou and see if I couldn't safely grab her cash, while also informing her that one of the kidnappers would be arrested today before the news got out. That'd be an easy way to impress her. But that was for the final, 'real' loop of the day. For the other repetitions of Sunday... well, I had a lot I could do, so I settled on spell practice. First with Restore Stamina. The spell was a complex mess compared to the cantrips I knew. It had a three-dimensional shape, with a pair of 'prongs' that rose up and twirled around each other. At a guess, it was three times as complicated in terms of layout as any one of my cantrips. So I took the entire time, with a few breaks, carving it out of my core four times. By the end, I had a version that looked like it might work, but some bits still felt a little off. Carving in a new direction was funky. I Reloaded, and this time tried Exhaust Senses. That one required buying the license off of a big corpo-owned site, or buying it for more off the Guild of Thaumaturgy's site. The second option was two hundred more, which brought the cost of the license up to a thousand-seven. Insane price, but... I supposed if they could sell it for that much, then they could sell it for that much. They did promise some amount of discretion... and it wasn't like I was going to actually pay them in any real timeline. Exhaust Senses had a whole new degree of complexity to it that I think almost pushed it into a second level spell, but not quite. It was larger, with one multi-forked segment designed like the spokes inside of a wheel, which each spoke being different. On casting, I could pick one of the five spokes, or two, or three... or all of them, really. Or I could ignore them. That would determine which of the primary five senses would be affected. Since each 'spoke' required magic to move through it differently, but also at the same time as the others, it required splitting my attention in a way that was kind of annoying. Doable, though. And the emotion for the spell to function was boredom, which... yeah, carving this damned thing fed me with plenty of that. I tried it three times, and I don't think any of the three would be good. Still, it was a start. Level one spells were supposed to take an experienced D-ranker something like a month to perfect, or if they pushed themselves, a week. So I'd give it a week of loop-time to see. After that, I needed a break. And there happened to be a concert in town... Shrugging, I got dressed as a proper punk. That meant cool jewelry, a beaten up old jacket, some fingerless gloves, and a pleated skirt in a red tartan pattern that had been in the bottom of my closet for a while, and of course, a tastefully ripped band shirt. I headed out, grabbed a bus, then made my way to City Centre around noon, where I found a cafe to eat at while browsing tickets online. Some scalper fuck was selling them at a nine-hundred percent upsale, and I bet he'd steal my credit card info too, the bastard. I still bought a ticket, though. The show started in the evening, but there was a huge crowd by five or so, and I joined in. It was my kind of crowd. Young men, pretty young women, lots of dancing and singing along, and when some cops came to tell us to cool down, we all made oinking noises at them. They didn't do anything about it. Protests were usually put down hard but... yeah, I knew that there was only one in ten people here that was a real punk. The rest were playing dress-up in designed punk costumes. Still fun, though. The crowd was let into one of the bigger arenas in City Centre, and I discovered that my ticket was at the ass-end of the back. So in true punk fashion, I said fuck that and climbed up a piller to find a nice seat high above. Security discovered me and told me to get down, and I flashed them both fingers. And probably a bit more, that skirt wasn't long, but I didn't care. The show started, and some indie pop band called Broccoli & the Friends she Made Along the Way started with some high-energy nightcore-ish folk-fusion pop. It was alright, but I was here for the Punk Pop Lady Killers. When they came on, it was electric. And so was the show they put on. It was proper punk music, rebellious and loud, and I cheered like a groupie when the lead singer started making out with the lead guitarist on scene. It ended eventually, and I Reloaded, but I couldn't help but still feel some of that energy. I wanted to punch someone in the nose! So I did that. I found a dojo not too far from home, the kind of seedy place that promised to teach you how to fight well. I walked over, barged in, and demanded that someone fight me. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. They told me to fuck off or they'd call the cops. I told them that I'd fight the cops in that case. Then I slapped some wanna-be black belt and it was on. There was a world of difference, I discovered, between the somewhat careful sparring I was used to and fighting some pissed off dude that just wanted to bash my teeth in. I don't think he was even an E-ranker, and yet I found myself Reloading after swallowing my own blood. Right... maybe I was a bit too full of myself. Didn't mean I didn't try three more times. It was good training. My semi-trained jiu-jitsu had better technique and moves than some off-the-street brawler's moves. But that didn't matter when he was faster and punched harder anyway. There was some of that testosterone bullshit. Being a D-ranker evened the field between normie men and D-rank women, but only by so much. The plus side was that ranker women tended to just be better at spell-casting. I don't even think it was hormones or anything. We were just better at dealing with emotions. Yay? Whatever, I could shove the sexist self-defeatism for now, I had some random dude to beat the shit out of. Unfortunately, a few loops weren't enough for me to pull off an Ip-man on the local dojo. At best I could knock out one guy before the cops showed up, and they liked to skip straight to the handguns. I think the tasers they had were mostly decorative. After a few reps of that, I decided to call it a day. My last repetition involved buying a burner phone, walking a few blocks over to a busy spot not too far from a big parking garage and a shopping centre, and calling Miss Ojou. She answered after two rings, and from the crisp sound of her voice, I figured she had augs of some sort handling the call. "Hello?" "Fran," I said while holding my mask up to my face. "A pleasure to speak with you again after so long." "So long? It's hardly been a day." Ah... right, that was yesterday, wasn't it? "Feels like it's been far longer since I last heard your voice," I said. Damn... was that smooth or cringe? Wait, no. I was hot. Which made cringe things I said smooth by default... I hoped. Fran chuckled. "Very well. And did you call me this morning just to be kind?" "No, though there's no harm in that," I said. "Two things. First... actually, I assumed that the line was secure on your end, but there's no harm in asking." "It should be," she replied. "I have the best Orchid Lux offers." That was probably very good. "Good," I said. "I'm on a simple burner. This number will be burned after this call, I'm afraid. I'll set up a more appropriate means of communication later. Second, if you don't mind me continuing?" "No, please do," she said. "I was in my gym, training. I can take a moment." She had her own gym? Wait, of course she had her own gym. Probably trainers and such too. "I wanted to let you in on some intel. The police are about to capture one Timothy Thompson." "Who?" "One of the men responsible for kidnapping you," I said. "He's on the run, but they'll have him in custody within the next three hours." "How do you know that?" "You set me on a task, didn't you?" I asked. "I'm professional about things." And full of shit. "Impressive. Is this... a good thing? The arrest?" "More or less. I suspect that the kidnappers will be broken out of jail by the week's end." "They're in the F-ENE PD's fortress jail. Escaping that is no easy feat." "And yet," I said. "Did you want them to succeed?" Fran was quiet for a long while. "I see where you're going with this. You want to track them down afterwards." "I, unfortunately, don't want to make the effort of breaking into jail to question them," I said. "You're paying me well, but not quite at that level." "Entirely understandable," she said. "I... give you the green light to proceed, then." "Good. Don't mention this to anyone. If word gets out, the police will tighten their grip and the break-out will fail. I'll try to be there the night of the jailbreak, to see what I can learn. There's going to be a money trail or something to follow. You are likely far better suited to tracking your sibling's expenditure and plans. Let me walk along the trail from the other end. You don't need to get your hands dirty." "Thank you," she said. "Ah. Speaking of money. Your dead drop." "Yes," I replied. "I'll have one of my guards carry... hmm, one of my old purses I suppose, to a lost and found in a small arcade I own on the edge of City Centre. It's a small place. No security to speak of. You should be able to retrieve it with relative ease." "Thank you. That would do nicely." She gave me the name, and the time, which was in just a few hours. Then I wished her a nice afternoon and hung up before tossing the phone. Time to get rich... and be discreet about it. ***