When no one’s looking (I see a huge casino!)

The longer Jane’s waking had been, the more sure she wasn’t suffering from a bad prank, or perhaps a mass delusion. It seemed she had indeed been flung to some distant world that ran on its own rules, and for some reason, she now had the body of a Bad Guy, Concrete Noun, Capitalized, Trademarked, and Monitored, gifted by something charmingly named the Menace that had gone and nearly smothered the planet in its toxic shades..

It seemed that sort of thing sounded more like a benefit for those living in the underbelly of Forness Heart, the very center of activity in all the land. Quite simply put, a big room that was hard to access, save by those who were hard to spot and constantly underestimated, made for a ridiculously lucrative business.

“I mean, it’s not like we’re rich or comfortable – the money we make can’t bring plumbing or heat down here. Fancy clothes don’t last long down here, and a box full of coin is otherwise hard to spend when a beggar with no past can’t walk into anything better than a temple giving out handouts,” Velstrik admitted. “Still, sometimes a merchant who knows us might find it cheaper to trade us some wine than deal with some clerk trying to skim all of it. Or, a trader might let himself get “robbed” for a week, and then have us return it when he leaves. We make some things easier.”

Jane could admire it, she supposed. Her old life was made out of flyers on lamp posts and utility poles, and lessons that let her pay rent, so for her, entrepreneurialism was more a matter of scrappy desperation, not high-flying university degrees.

“You’ve managed to build up a lot of trust to make this system work,” she noted, as she kept following Velstrik through the ruins. Again, it wasn’t like her mind's eye, with packed streets full of underdwellers. It was more sad than anything, with scattered tents and fires surrounded by thin groups of huddled figures, but she could see some talk and some careful laughter. One larger group sat by a sizzling pan where they took turns throwing on fresh vegetables to fry, and intermittently pluck at with skewers.

It was the fine line between informality and out-and-out anarchy.

“It wasn’t easy,” Velstrik commented, with a nervous laugh. “It’s not like I had anything to do with it, either, it’s just something the people here slowly worked out. At the end of our rope, some of us figured that even if we don’t have anything, we can still trade trust, so we make sure we’re the most trustworthy in all of Forness Heart.”

“What, so you’re saying I can trust you, then?” Jane scoffed. “Talk is cheap when you just decided to just pluck up a random monster girl for no good reason.”

“W-well, I won’t say you can trust me, I’ll just find a way to prove it. Even with your horns and tail, it just didn’t seem right to abandon you… I mean, aren’t we all, down here? Abandoned?”

Even if she was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, it still left her plenty of questions about her immediate future. She wasn’t even sure what she was going to wind up as.

(Just be yourself. It means more than you think,) something on the wind whispered, even down in this dark, stagnant place.

“Well, how long do you expect me to be ‘down here’? Hell, what do you expect me to do?”

“Well, it’d be nice if I introduced you to everyone, but after, I can show you all the ways one can sneak into Forness Heart. You can leave any time, it’s just… There has to be a way we can help each other, right?”

It was one of those “little guys have to stick together” speeches, and the only reason it sounded convincing was because of how cloyingly earnest Velstrik was in trying to say “teamwork makes the dream work”. Cliche, but impassioned.

“Look, just get this: I’m not going to be a permanent fixture here. I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t think I’ll be spending the rest of my life here.”

“I don’t think anyone here does. That’s why I’ll let you see the city above.”

Velstrik continued the tour, leading Jane ever upward along routes both jerry-rigged and ancient – a wood bridge made of old timber and disassembled furniture spanned a gap between two buried houses courtesy of some drifting engineers, while a staircase older than both of them took them to catacombs that apparently predated Forness Heart by a surprising number of years.

“The Kingdom just never bothered mapping the place?” Jane asked, incredulous. The underground chambers were surprisingly lacking in dust, and the ease with which her guide waved his torch about to check his surroundings showed how much of this place was essentially not owned by the crown that literally sat atop it.

“Institutional arrogance?” Velstrik suggested. “I mean, I didn’t want to tell you, but I was once very wealthy, before the war… and back then I never considered paying attention to the world around me. Even his Highness Rulio II is more concerned about tending to his borders - we can only wonder if he will ever find time to look downwards-”

“Hold up,” Jane suddenly announced, interrupting him. As he turned back and looked with some concern, the woman’s nose twitched and squashed in irritation as a collection of scents slid up her nasal passage and fired off all sorts of reactions in her brain foreign to her experience.

There was a complex medley of iron that made her want to hunt. The stench of sweat made her want to flex her claws in preparation. Dozens of other sorts of musks and smells avoided being washed clean by the aqueducts of the homeless depths and caught ahold of Jane, as she unconsciously identified something else within the underground passages.

“Vel-” She warned.

“V-Vel?”

“A ton of folk just died around here.”

“What?” Velstrik waveringly gasped, while his charge pointed down one archway in the darkness.

“Something happened down that way. I mean, we could avoid it and keep on going…”

“Maybe there’s someone still alive!” Velstrik answered, finishing Jane’s thoughts. The chimera was many things, and she was now many more things, but she had an unfortunately low capacity for wilful ignorance.

Velstrik gave another nervous gulp and carefully walked side by side with Jane, who found herself suddenly far too amped with a sense of competition to be afraid as she followed the smells, up until they rounded a corner and found an absolute mess.

It was amazing how unaffected Jane was, merely blinking at the torn collection of bodies smearing the floor and walls in viscera and shattered, ornate armor. Velstrik had to take a second to turn back around and choke back his gorge, giving the chimera time to mince her way around the stiff arms and legs poking through the mess.

“We better not be grave-robbing,” Jane declared.

“We can’t,” Velstrik sternly answered, as he held a dead hand and peered at a ring stuck on it. “I… I think this was a squad of Spirit Knights. Getting caught with their equipment is a serious crime. Others have tried in the past, and we always suffered for it. We’ve stopped.”

“Trust, huh?”

“At least be trusted not to be foolish,” Velstrik said with another one of his sad laughs. “I might wrangle some folk later to collect these bodies and drop them somewhere they’ll be more easily found. Those who know will know it was us, and we can trade on that instead-”

“Hm, is that breathing?”

Jane straightened, alert, staring into the shadows. There was a wet, weak rasp somewhere in the dark, and it was enough to make Velstrik scramble for a rescue as the chimera followed behind, until the former remembered which of the two was the syhee (?) with super senses.

In one of the corners of the chamber was a particularly impressive pile of bodies, suggesting a brave last stand. There, Jane heard more labored breathing, and without even consciously considering the method, reached into the pile and began hurling bodies away. Velstrik’s panicked altruism added to the energy, leaving neither aware or considering at how the arms of the woman seemed to contort and ripple with effort, letting her effortlessly pry each armored corpse away until, close to the bottom, cushioned by his former comrades, was a young man covered in blood and wounds – out cold, but definitely remaining in the land of the living.

“Well, Vel,” Jane asked. “Can Spirit Knights be considered leftovers?”