Chapter Four Hundred and Four. Setting the stage.

Chapter Four Hundred and Four. Setting the stage.

"Good evening, Bob," Elania said, waving Taylor into the room. "I'm afraid it's going to take some time to sort out Mr. Eilodon's legal status, but for the moment, everything is on hold, so he doesn't need to leave. I've spoken to Special Agent Johnson, and he is aware."

"Thank you," Bob replied.

"Your actions at the hotel have already been noticed," Elania continued. "Someone was filming the press of people from outside the hotel, and they captured the whole thing. It's already received a hundred thousand views, so I suspect this is one of those things that ends up going viral."

"Hopefully, people will take it as a lesson that ambushing my team is a dangerous and inadvisable activity," Bob grumbled.

"I would suggest that, as your presence has not gone unnoticed, you take the time to meet with at least one journalist," Elania said. "It's impossible to avoid them, so giving them something to chew on will relieve the pressure a bit."

"I'm not overly fond of reporters," Bob sighed. "But you're right."

"Of course I am," Elania chuckled. "I'd go further and suggest that you might consider choosing one of the people you inadvertently assaulted. It would soothe a few of those ruffled feathers."

"I don't know any of them," Bob complained.Follow current novels at novelhall.com)

"Actually, you do," Elania replied. "One of them is Amanda Vasquez. She ran into the bathroom and wasn't present when Harv cast his ritual repair spell, thus missing out on having her clothing restored. She had to have her network deliver a change of clothes, and it didn't go unnoticed, which is why we know she's there."

"She was the one who accused me of having an easy time," Bob's voice carried a hint of disgust.

"She was," Elania agreed. "She also took a heavy dose of abuse for that. I'm not saying that giving her a second interview will make her a friend, but it might make her an ally. Right now, you have a lot of people who like you, but none of them are in the media."

"I guess I could spare a few minutes," Bob said.

"A wise choice," Elania agreed.

"Thank you, Madam President," Bob said before ending the call.

Elania sighed, looking across her desk at Taylor.

Her Chief of Staff offered her a wan smile. "At least he was amenable to suggestions," Taylor offered.

"True enough," Elania shook her head. "He can be awfully recalcitrant when he sets his mind to something. Any blowback so far?"

"None," Taylor reported. "The aide who saw the document doesn't know that the friend she shares her lunch hour with is a stringer for us, and the stringer believes that her instructions to leak the information are entirely due to her handler's dislike of Mr. Whitman due to his impact on his religion. We're quite well insulated."

"His reaction, while unexpected, does let us guide him a bit further," Elania noted. "He should be willing to at least consider our request."

"Especially if we make his friend Harv's troubles go away," Taylor agreed, pausing for a moment before continuing. "I'm still not convinced this was entirely necessary," she began. "Given the nature of the project, it seems unlikely that he would decline to lend his aid, regardless of any additional debts owed."

"We don't actually need him," Elania sighed, "it's just that having him onboard would make things easier."

"The sad truth is that he still has a lot of pull, especially with the people we want to recruit," she continued. "If he tells them that it's necessary, they'll do it."

"We'll need to have someone reach out to Ms. Vasquez and suggest a few questions that should help pave the way," Taylor sighed. "Thankfully, California is still your home state, so we have a friend at her network."

Bob shook his head as he hung up the phone.

"It sounds like she's going to take care of Harv's little problem," Bob reported. "She suggested I talk to one of the journalists downstairs that we blasted. I guess someone got a video of it, so we should 'get ahead' of the story."

"She's not wrong," Amanda said quickly. "A quick word with one of the vultures will give them something to dissect instead of hounding us."

"Also, you should do it now," Jessica said with a wicked smile. "They're not going to look or feel their best, and the contrast between the two of you will tilt things heavily in your favor for anyone watching."

"True," Amanda agreed.

"I could go down and find someone," Dave suggested.

"Actually, the President had a suggestion already," Bob said. "Do you remember that reporter who interviewed me after I finished that marathon reincarnation session here in L.A.?"

"I think so," Amanda mused. "Latino, sort of sexy attorney vibe?"

"Well, I guess she was in the group downstairs," Bob replied.

"I can see that," Amanda said. "She must have taken a nasty hit with how that last interview ended. Giving her another one won't make her a friend necessarily, but she'll definitely owe you."

"We should do the interview in the suite," Jessica suggested. "It'll present our size as 'normal' while she'll look like a child."

If they failed to appreciate Monroe, they clearly weren't the sort of people he wanted to interact with anyway.

"That's an awfully large cat," Vasquez said, trepidation clear in her voice.

"He is," Bob agreed. "He's also impossibly soft if you'd care to give him a pet."

The reporter reached out hesitantly and ran her fingers through Monroe's silken ruff.

"Oh," she breathed. "He is soft. What do you use to shampoo him?"

"Nothing," Bob replied. "He picked up an achievement that made it so his fur stays clean and never tangles. It can't even get wet."

"How did he get an achievement?" Vasquez asked, startled.

"Same way everyone else did," Bob shrugged.

"Did you know that Monroe is actually an object of veneration?" Jessica asked.

"If you go into your system interface, you'll find him under the Divine Blessing section, under Ancestral Blessings," Jesica continued.

Vasquez's eyes lost their focus for a few moments, then she shook her head. "I knew you had some sort of odd quasi-diety thing going on, but I didn't realize it extended to your cat."

"Just the System recognizing that he's the most handsome kitty ever," Bob replied, reaching down to scratch behind Monroe's ears.

"How did he get so big?" Vasquez asked.

"If you take the Familiar skill, and you've earned the trust of your feline overlord, you can not only use crystals to increase their level, but you can tier them up alongside you," Bob explained. "At tier seven and level forty-two, I suspect that Monroe is the strongest kitty on the whole planet, aren't you, buddy?" Bob continued lavishing affection on Monroe, who twitched his tail, indicating his agreement that he was indeed the strongest kitty in the world.

"I don't think I'd want Mittens to get that big," Vasquez muttered. "Feeding him must be a nightmare."

"Oh, we switched off of cat food when I summoned him to Thayland," Bob shook his head. "They don't really have a pet food industry over there, or at least they didn't at the time. Who knows how much has changed at this point? But they didn't back then, so we switched to a purely meat-based diet. We never switched him back, but luckily most Dungeons have monsters that you can harvest meat from, so it hasn't been an issue."

She grimaced. "I have been in every Dungeon Los Angeles has to offer, but I haven't been killing monsters," she said.

"It can be a bit much," Amanda sympathized. "We were all D&D geeks, and it took us a bit to get used to it."

"Not like the Marines," Dave chuckled. "I won't lie, I felt a little bit like a wuss with the way they dove into it."

"But humans are nothing if not adaptable," Jessica added. "You can get used to just about anything if you keep subjecting yourself to it."

"Have you leveled up at all?" Amanda asked.

"I have," Vasquez replied. "I'm level five."

"What did you take for skills, if you don't mind my asking?" Dave asked.

"I took Investigation, Persuasion, Glibness, Matrix Manipulation, and Dodge," she replied. "The last two were required in order to enter a Dungeon as a non-combatant."

"Strewth, you're not going to be delving with those skills," Jessica shook her head sadly.

"I'm aware," Vasquez said stiffly. "By the time I realized just how much everything had changed, it was too late."

"You can always reincarnate," Bob offered. "Sure, it's ten years off the back end of your life, but that only matters until you reach tier six."

Vasquez scoffed. "It would cost me two hundred crystals for the ritual and then another two hundred and fifty to level back up," she shook her head. "The government is still taxing the hell out of the delvers, and the end result is that there aren't that many crystals floating around. Outside of my food voucher, I get paid ten crystals a week."

"Ouch," Dave muttered.

"Then I have to pay my rent and bills," Vasquez continued. "I have a master's from Brown! But I can barely afford the rent on a postage stamp walkup." She shook her head again, taking a deep breath to compose herself. "Still, we're not here for me to complain about my life."

"We could help you with that, you know?" Bob said, pulling a pouch with a thousand mana crystals out of his inventory and removing seven smaller pouches from it, each with a hundred crystals, before offering them to her.

"Seven hundred crystals, and I can cast the ritual, or we can get Erick to do it if you'd rather an actual priest perform it," Bob continued.

Vasquez blinked. "Why would you offer me that?" She asked. "I wasn't exactly nice to you the last time I interviewed you. Are you trying to get me to go easy on you?"

"No? It just sounds like you need some help, and while I'm not exactly rolling in crystals, we delve every day, usually three or maybe four runs, so this represents like a quarter of a day's work for me," Bob shrugged.

"Remember, this is the guy who started casting reincarnation rituals, free of charge, for a bunch of people in that hospice that he'd never met before," Jessica said softly as she leaned over Bob's shoulder and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "That's just the man he is."