The Outlands

“Alright, so, we need to talk about our budget.” Tess said. It was a couple days after their visit to Alice’s parents, and she was currently at her home in Mael, sitting in the living room with her fiancées. Gramps had told them in no uncertain terms that Maven was to be staying in the guest room until the three of them moved out together, saying that time with loved ones was precious and something to be taken whenever the opportunity arose. Maven wouldn’t even have to wear her humanizing ring if she didn’t want to, since they had already started the process of making the area a paranormal hotspot.

So, Maven had happily moved in. She didn’t have very much stuff in her old place, and it would seem that the contract on her old place had very purposefully been made so that she could cut it off at any time, so the move had only taken a few hours. For now, Maven was keeping most of her stuff in a couple of magic bags, so they were doing their best to expedite the process of getting their own place.

“I think that since Alice’s parents have offered to help us out, we should look at a more permanent residence, instead of a starter one.” Maven said. “It’ll cost a bit more now, but it’ll probably save money in the long run. And as long as we have enough money for utilities, groceries, and a little bit for entertainment, we don’t really have much else to spend money on, so we can opt for a rather large monthly payment.”

“That sounds about right to me.” Ellie replied. “You thinking buying or renting?”

“I don’t see a reason not to buy. I think it’d be nice to get to the point where we’re not completely dependent on freelancing for our income, and I’m sure after a few years we’ll get to a point where we’re easily outstripping what we are paying monthly and can start putting it towards other things.”

Tess grabbed her phone, and quickly dialed up Alice’s number.

“Tess?” Alice said, picking up after only a few rings. “What’s up?”

“Well, we were talking about our budget for moving out, and Mom suggested that you might have a better idea of what we kind of budget we should be aiming for than she did.”

“Isn’t she kind of a money god?” Alice asked, a note of incredulity in her voice.

“She says she doesn’t actually have much experience with budgeting and that kind of stuff.” Tess explained. “As a god there’s no need for her to personally buy things, and in terms of how she interacts with money, she mostly just watches people make bad decisions on what they do with theirs.”

“Oh, that makes sense. Uh, yeah, I can help out with that. Do you wanna do it over the phone or…”

Tess glanced at her fiancées. “Do you two want to meet up with Alice or talk over the phone?”

“Let’s meet up with her.” Ellie said. “We might as well take the opportunity to go and see her.”

“I agree.” Maven said. “I think that we should try and meet in person with people when we can, and something important like this is better done in person anyway.”

Tess gave them a nod. “Yeah, let’s talk in person. Do you have a place in mind?”

“Where are you guys right now?” Alice asked. “I’m just hanging out at my place in the City.”

“We’re at Gramp’s house in Mael.” Tess replied. “You can come over if you want, we’re not really worried about the whole non-human thing anymore, so you wouldn’t even have to disguise yourself.”

“Eh, why not. Meet me at the guild lobby in ten minutes?”

“Alright, I’ll be there, talk to you soon.” Tess said.

“Talk to you soon!” Alice replied, then hung up the phone.

“Alice says she’s cool down to come over, and that she’ll be at the guild lobby in ten minutes.” Tess relayed. “If you two want to come, you can, or you can stay here, your call.”

“I’ll take some time to get out of my pjs.” Ellie replied. “You can go on without me.”

“And I’ll freshen up a bit.” Maven added. “Unless you want someone to come with you, in which case I’ll come.”

“Nah, I’ll be good just on my phone.” Tess said, morphing her armor from pajamas into regular day wear. “I’ll be off now, call if you need anything.”

As Tess left, she took a moment to appreciate how easy and convenient her routine was; since her armor could change appearance and was self-cleaning, it basically negated the need for having other sets of clothes outside of using them as a reference. And, between that and Target of Affection keeping her always looking and smelling her best, she basically didn’t need to do anything to go anywhere.

She still did basic hygiene like showering and brushing her teeth, Target of Affection didn’t clear away dirt or bits of food, but even that technically wasn’t necessary most of the time. If she was really in a hurry, she could use Phoenix Fire at maximum heat to flash burn away most stuff, but it left a lingering smell wherever she did it and it didn’t feel clean, so she tried to avoid it.

As Tess stepped through the door and into the Outlands, she turned on her fox traits, took out her phone, and idly brought up a game, using her tremorsense to navigate in lieu of her eyes. And that too made her realize just how far she had gotten from her old self. Before she had become Tess, and was just regular old Thomas, she was…well, a normal human. And now, even by magical standards, she was on the stranger side of things.

It was something she didn’t really stop to think about much, how she used senses the vast majority of people would never have, how if she wanted, she could simply walk up a wall without even expending Mana, how at a moment’s notice she could become something that looked completely alien to how she did before.

She finished navigating through the back halls of the guild, pushing open the door and giving a quick hello to the attendant at the nearby desk, who was doing some sort of paperwork while watching to make sure nobody unauthorized got into the back of the guild. From there, she made her way over to one of the many chairs the guild had set up in the lobby for people who were waiting, and began to write a text to Alice.

Hey Alice, I’m in the lobby’s sitting area. She wrote. No need to rush yourself or anything, Ellie and Maven are getting themselves ready, I just came early because I wasn’t going to be doing anything but be on my phone anyway. Let me know when you get here

Tess sent the message, then returned to her game, mind still wandering. She wasn’t exactly sure what had got her thinking like this, perhaps it was just because she was thinking about big life changes, or perhaps she was just in an introspective mood, but regardless her mind was kept occupied until Alice arrived.

“Hey.” Alice said, giving Tess a smile. “How’s it going?”

“I’ve been pretty good.” Tess replied, closing her game and putting her phone back in her pocket before standing up and giving Alice a quick hug. “It’s been a little busy, juggling freelancing and starting the process of going through our stuff in preparation for moving, not to mention moving Maven out, but it’s been fulfilling.”

“Do you want any help?” Alice offered. “Ker, Jin, and I are all staying in town until after the wedding, and we’d be more than happy to pitch in.”

“We’ll let you know if we need any, but we’ll probably be fine on our own. With magic bags to put stuff in and the fact that we’re just stronger and have more endurance than we used to, we’re not anticipating much trouble. Really, the hardest part is probably going to be deciding what furniture to get, but we’ve decided to hold off on even thinking about that until we have a better idea of what our finances will look like.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Alice said, waving a hand dismissively. “I can get you a huge discount on nice stuff, and we’ll make sure you have a comfortable house. I’d feel really guilty if you were living with all budget secondhand furniture that’s probably half-broken when I could have done something.”

“I don’t think we’d be that desperate.” Tess laughed, motioning for Alice to follow her towards the back of the guild. “We’d probably just put in a little extra time in one of the dungeons to make up for it and buy it piece by piece, and that’s worst-case scenario.”

“In some ways, that’s even worse!” Alice protested. “You’d be going around without furniture!”

“We don’t really need that much.” Tess replied. “Just a bed that’s big enough for the three of us, a table, and some chairs. The rest is all luxuries. Plus, if we’re bored, we can always go hang out at my mom’s place, she’s got some pretty nice stuff there.”

Alice shook her head in disbelief. “No matter how many times I hear you call her Mom, it never gets any less mind-boggling.” She said. “Nor does you just ‘hanging out at her place’. I sometimes wonder if you really know just how abnormal that is.”

“I don’t.” Tess admitted, giving a nod to the attendant before leading Alice into the corridors of the guild and towards the exit to their home. “I mean, I don’t have the same…sense of scale that you do, everything was so…nebulous growing up. The existence of the gods wasn’t a confirmed thing, and our family wasn’t even particularly religious.”

“It makes sense, but it still seems funny, all things considered.” Alice said.

They chatted a bit more while they walked, and they were soon in the living room in Tess’s house, where Ellie and Maven were waiting. “Oh, good, you’re here.” Ellie said. “Maven and I were going through our income and what we have on hand, and we’d just finished tallying up the money the two of us have.”

“How much?” Alice asked, taking a seat on the couch across from Ellie and Maven. “Though…it’s probably not as much as Tess has, everything considered, so that’ll still be on the low end of things.”

“We’ve got about six hundred gold between the two of us.” Maven said. “And that’s including assets we can easily liquidate such as extra cores or miscellaneous loot.”

“I’ll be honest, I’ve got no clue how much everything I have is worth.” Tess admitted, sitting down next to Maven. “In raw cash, I think I have anywhere from five hundred to one thousand gold? The side-work the three of us did on the expedition was…quite a bit more lucrative than I had expected. And in terms of cores…well, it’s hard to say, I don’t sell at market price, I just give the surplus to Gramps every so often and he gives me a reasonable amount of money in return.

“I don’t sell all of them at once, just in case we need some, so I’ve got a bunch sitting around in my bag right now. If we set a portion aside for the operation of the hoverer, I’m guessing we’d get another fifteen-hundredish from them from Gramps? A ton more if we take the time and sell them piece by piece, but that takes a lot of time so we don’t flood the market too much.”

“Tell you what,” Alice said, “I can just buy whatever you have from you at the rate the guild would give you. And don’t think I’m just offering to help out and being troubled by it, I’d be making a net profit by doing so. In a company the size of Reshi Industries, we go through a ton of cores, and we buy from the guild, who obviously sells at higher than they buy for. I can pretty easily wave away my acquisition, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve bought cores in bulk from some random freelancer who wants to offload, so it should be risk-free, too.”

“That sounds good to me, but let me check with the gods real quick.” Tess replied. “Life and Dungeons probably know whether or not it’s a safe amount to dump.”

Tess turned her attention back to Alice. “Yeah, they say it’s fine, it’ll probably be about a month’s worth of cores for you.”

Alice gave Tess a dumbfounded look. “A month?! How many cores do you have in there?!”

Tess shrugged. “At least five thousand, more likely ten to twenty thousand? I don’t know, a lot.”

“When did you even kill that many monsters?!” Alice exclaimed.

“I haven’t sold since before the expedition, and I was keeping a stockpile in case we needed a lot of money fast. Plus, we killed a lot of monsters in our other work during the expedition, and also every single monster that was killed in the dungeons we went to on the expedition, including the ones you guys killed, all the ones we killed in the runs we did at the dungeon over our one-month stint by ourselves…it adds up really fast when literally every monster drops one.”

“How do you only have less than a thousand gold?!” Alice replied. “How much does the Guildmaster give you?”

“I’ll generally offload batches of a few thousand to him, and he’ll give me fifty to a hundred gold for them. Yes, I know that it’s way below market rate, but for the time being we want to keep our income at just above what a normal party our level would make, and he’s paying out of pocket; it would be kind of hard to explain to the guild’s treasurers what that much money is going towards if he paid me even half the price the guild normally pays.”

“Okay, we’re going to have to come back to the numbers on this, I seriously underestimated how many you had.” Alice said. “I don’t think I can explain away a purchase of that size with just ‘I picked them up from a deal with a freelancer’. No one keeps that many cores on hand.”

“I have a suggestion.” Maven said. “And, of course Tess has the final say on this, since they’re her cores, but why don’t you just take the cores, and work something out with your parents? They offered to give us a discount on a house as a wedding gift, and this way you won’t have to put anything on an official record. Assuming you have enough, you can pay for the house out of pocket, and then slowly make fake trades and give the company a portion of the cores in exchange for the equivalent purchase price refunded to you.”

“Good idea, Maven.” Tess said. “One correction, though; they’re not my cores, they’re our cores. Without you and Ellie, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as many of them. But, yeah, totally on board for that.”

Alice seemed to recover from her shock, a mischievous smile rising to her lips. “Yes, I like that idea.” She said. “I’ll just put down an amount equivalent to our core budget for a month, and we can transfer the cores whenever. How much room do they take?”

“Um…I dunno?” Tess ventured. “A lot? The cores vary in size and the bag I use is comically large, so I haven’t really needed to keep track of them. Assume like…one of those big industrial mixers, but I’m absolutely just guessing.”

“Okay, I’ll have to fetch some separate bags for them.” Alice said. “And also a transfer tool, because there’s no way we can do this by hand. I’ll go get the process started, you guys kick back for the night. Oh, and don’t buy any furniture for the house; I can easily roll it into the cost of the house, and I can get you stuff better suited to your needs. Just leave it to me, okay?”

“You’re the expert.” Tess said. “Thanks, Alice.”

“No, thank you.” Alice replied. “Believe me, in the long run this’ll more than pay for itself.” And with that she said her goodbyes, and soon the three girls were alone once again.

“So…now what?” Tess asked. “I was sort of expecting budgeting to take most of the rest of the day.”

“For now, veg out on the couch?” Ellie suggested. “Maybe have some more fun later?”

“Way ahead of you.” Maven said, already standing up and heading towards the guest room. “Let me go change again.”

Ellie sighed dramatically. “Well, now I feel like I just should have kept my pajamas on.” She moaned. “Now I’ve got to go to all the effort of changing back because someone had to be sitting on a fortune.”

“Literally!” Maven called out from down the hall.

Tess chuckled, sliding a hand into one of the pockets that served as the entrance to her bag. “Sorry. Guess I’ll just have to make it up to you. How about a shoulder rub?”

“I suppose.” Ellie replied, giving Tess a playful smile and a quick peck on the cheek. “Why don’t you find us something to do while Maven and I are changing?”

Tess gave her a smile back, then picked up the TV remote and began to thumb through their options.