Chapter 75 – An explanation later

Chapter 75 – An explanation later

“Well, I need to get stronger without you in some way, don’t I?” Rave asked as they were sitting around her room. Copernicus was fervently refusing to come out right now so Rave had eventually given up.

“Yeah but that jump is stupid high.”

“Aaaand?”

“And that is bullshit.”

“Hey, I needed twenty years to get to this point. If you grind non-stop for a week you reach this level. Now tell me whose ability is bullshit again?” Rave confronted him and John had no other choice but to sigh and agree to that. “In other news, I was wrong about Moira,” Rave repeated her earlier admission. “So what is our plan now?”

“Now we look into Victoria.... how about we call Travolta and see if he found out anything?” John suggested. With some reluctance but now thoroughly without arguments, Rave pulled out her phone, put it on speaker and called Travolta.

“What?” The annoyed voice of the guild leader echoed from the phone.

“Hey, Travy, it’s me, Rave.”

“I know, I can fucking read,” came the disgruntled answer. “The hell do you want?” There was a sound in the background like something that was rotating with tremendous speed.

“Well, I wanted to apologize for yesterday and...”

“Wait, yesterday? Don’t you mean today?” Travolta probed, his voice seemed slightly panicked, “No, the meeting was yesterday.”

“Shit... really? Where did the time go... I don’t remember sleeping... whatever, make this short, I need to be somewhere... Hurry!”

“So, we found out Moira is innocent.”

“Shocker. What else?!” Was the quick answer to that. John looked at the phone with a raised eyebrow. Sure, Travolta wasn’t the nicest person around but he usually was controlled angry, now he sounded just straight up angry and panicked. He had been acting weirdly yesterday too. The rotating sound in the background stopped and was replaced by the sound of glass clacking against glass. “What- Else?!” Travolta repeated.

Rave exchanged a glance with John, she also sensed something was off.

‘I have the route memorized, Master,’ came the response. ‘I do, however, feel uncomfortable about using the money designated for the household for my own transportation.’

‘Don’t worry about it, I will put new money in later,’ John eased her worries.

‘I understand, in that case I will wait for you at the bus station closest to the designated target.’ Aclysia said.

‘Very good, see you in a bit.’

‘Click,’ She thought out loud and John giggled.

“Okay, so Aclysia will await us at the forest.” He informed his girlfriend and they got moving. It was great to not watch over Aclysia all the time. During the last week, he had the idea to just let her run the errands of grocery shopping and do the chores so that she wouldn’t spend all her day doing nothing (or worse: On reddit).

The first time he did that it was catastrophic. Aclysia had been molested, screamed at, cursed at and somebody even tried to hire her as a hooker (or escort as they called it). He had been monitoring the whole ordeal from start to finish. The second time around he made sure that he raised Aclysia’s Charisma to 10 first. Now people only stared at her when she went out because she was stunning, not because her way of speaking grated the uninitiated and she misread most social cues. Since then there had been no problems (although the escort offers continued).

Besides that she kept the apartment clean. So clean that he was afraid his mother would be suspicious when she returned. The same problem didn’t apply to the money, luckily. He just put that into his inventory and only left 20$ in the envelope to make it seem like he had spent it responsibly. Truth was that their allowance was a pittance compared to the wealth grinding had gotten him. It was odd to know he had more liquid cash than his parents.

“Oh crap! I wanted to look into mana items from the Auction!” he suddenly blurted out as they arrived at their destination.

“Little late for that now.” Rave said and nudged him out of the bus, “Well, okay, ya could actually still buy stuff but the extra you would have to pay to order it here would be massive.”

“Why though? They have flying drones, I don’t believe that it would cost them that much more.”

“It won’t cost THEM more but they know that ya would generally pay more for deliveries in the middle of nowhere.” Rave explained.

John sighed as economics lessons sprung back into his head, “Yeah, yeah, supply and demand are the factors of the price.”

They headed over to Aclysia who was standing next to the bus sign, in the exact middle of a stone slab and perfectly still like a statue with hands folded in front of her waistline. She only reacted once John stepped up to her.

“Greetings, John,” she said, with that typical bow. She was still an odd one and still robotic around the edges, but the Gamer would have been lying if he said he wasn’t developing genuine feelings for her. Fifteen steps towards the forest and Aclysia asked, “Are we farming Treants again today?”

“No... we’ll have to figure out which one,” John responded.