Taylor’s reaction to seeing the lively town lasted just long enough that Leo began growing genuinely concerned for her, but she did manage to snap out of it eventually. Rapidly blinking, she shook her head, frowning as she turned to look at him.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what happened?’” Leo asked, looking at her incredulously. “You took one look at town and practically went comatose. I still can’t judge time all that accurately, but I’m pretty certain you completely shut down for at least a good fifteen or twenty minutes!”

  “I did?” Taylor asked, her eyes widening. “I didn’t realize… My memories. Some of them came back to me. I saw my past.”

  “Really?” Leo asked, more than a little surprised to hear that. From how Taylor spoke of her lack of memories, or near total lack thereof, he’d really begun to think that they’d been lost for good. “What did you see?”

  “Not much. Everything was sort of hazy, like I was watching through the poison fog of my plane. But I saw a town. People I cared about going about their lives. I saw it collapse. I was in the kitchen of a restaurant at the time, watching the customers through the window when it all started. Then… I don’t know.”

  Taylor grunted, leaning forward and aggressively rubbing her temples as if trying to squeeze a few more memories out of her altered mind. “I feel like I almost saw something really important, but couldn’t quite make it out. It makes me mad.”

  “It’s alright. The fact that you got some of your memories back means that you’ll probably be able to get some others,” Leo smiled, catching himself before he started rubbing her back in an attempt to make her feel better like how his parents would with him when he wasn’t feeling well. Part of him couldn’t help but view Taylor as some sort of wounded, feral beast he’d picked up and was trying to nurse back to health. Which was doubly entertaining seeing as she had been the one to rescue him and keep him safe while he recovered from his earlier injuries.

  “Maybe,” Taylor grunted, sighing as she let her hands fall from her head and sat up straight, looking around at the town with a more active interest. “So, what is the plan?”

  “Well, we need two things really. Information and equipment. But in order to get either of those, there’s a third problem we need to tackle. We need money.”

  “Money,” Taylor said slowly, as if testing the word with her tongue. “Haven’t thought about that in a long time. Do you have any?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t,” Leo admitted. “I had some saved up back home, but I didn’t exactly get the chance to bring any with me when my house burned down and my plane collapsed.”

  “Why do we need money for information? Can’t we just ask people?”

  “Maybe, but they might feed us false information. Not necessarily on purpose, but we might get rumors they just assumed to be true and are passing along, for example. If you want specific, vetted information regarding other planes, there’s only one place to go, and it’s not exactly cheap. We need a Listener.”

  “And that is…?” Taylor asked, her eyes locked on a man walking with his young daughter across the street from them, the two family members laughing all the while.

  “Pretty much any decent-sized town with frequent gem holder travel will have a Listener,” Leo explained. “Their job is to record and sift through all the different information that comes in from the gem holders who go through town. Sometimes they even send out other gem holders to verify certain things, or they just mark the information as ‘unreliable’ and leave it at that. Gem holders are happy to share information with Listeners, as they often trade it for relevant intel on the planes they are planning to go to next.”

  “Why can’t we trade like that?”

  “Well, the knowledge that my home plane collapsed a few weeks back should have already made the rounds, which means the only information I have that would be useful is the fact that it was the Planar Lords who collapsed my home plane instead of me,” Leo hissed, lowering his voice despite the fact that nobody was near them at the moment. “Or that the bounty on my head that was probably cancelled after I faked my death should be reinstated, seeing as I’m still alive. I can’t exactly reveal either of those two facts, or we’ll have agents after us in no time. If we don’t have information to trade, we need money.”

  “Fine. How do we get money?”

  “We need to either sell some stuff, do a job, or steal it,” Leo sighed, annoyed that he was even entertaining that third option. He’d never stolen a single thing in his life, but desperate times called for desperate measures. If millions of lives within the Nexus were relying on him to become a petty thief, he’d do it. “I’d prefer we just sold something so we didn’t have to resort to stealing or wasting time on some random task, but we don’t really have anything worthwhile to sell on us.”

  “...Can’t we just sell a monster gem?”

  “Magical beast,” Leo corrected, rolling his eyes in frustration. “And I mean, we could, but it… uh…” He paused, blinking at the realization he was an idiot. His parents had even told him all about the bustling gem market stretching across the planarverse, but that was something one only really encountered in larger towns. His own home plane had been too small to have one, but this town they were in actually looked a good bit bigger, and seemed to get more foot traffic from gem holders than his had. There was a good chance there would be a gem shop tucked away somewhere.

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  Reaching into his pack, Leo pulled out the black box that now held the Grade 10 dark cat gem. Seeing as the gem belonged to a magical beast only encountered in a toxic, incredibly dangerous plane for its tier, they would probably be able to get quite a good price for it.

  “...In my defense, I forgot that was an option,” Leo argued weakly.

  “Uh-huh,” Taylor said, shaking her head as she got to her feet. “Let’s go sell it.”

  Leo had been a tad worried Taylor would freeze up again as they headed into town proper, but she seemed to have gotten control of herself. She was definitely walking a bit stiffer than usual, but that wasn’t surprising with the dozens of people milling about all around them. Thankfully, the two of them didn’t get too many strange looks now that they weren’t pretending to be statues on the edge of town, and it wasn’t long before they stumbled upon the gem shop.

  Entering the tiny shop, Leo looked around, his brow raised at the impressive selection for a shop of this size. There were a few dozen placards lining the wall, each one advertising a specific magical beast gem and going over exactly what it was capable of in extensive detail. None of the gems were sitting out of course, as the risk of some hungry gem holder attempting to steal them would be far too high, but there were a few fake gem boxes under each placard to give the impression that the shop was fully stocked.

  “Welcome!” an older, slightly rotund man called out as they walked in. Marking his spot in the book he was reading, the man placed it to the side, giving them his full attention. “I’m Gordon, owner of our fair town’s gem shop. Can I help you two with anything?”

  “We have a gem to sell… and I guess we might be interested in potentially buying a gem or two if something catches our eye,” Leo admitted. The money they made from this sale should more than cover anything they needed to get from the Listener, so it couldn’t hurt to look around.

  “Wonderful! I love adding new gems to my collection,” Gordon smiled, gesturing for them to place their goods on the counter. “May I see what you’ve brought in for me today?”

  Doing just that, Leo watched as Gordon opened the black box, peering curiously at the dark cat gem hidden inside. With a ‘hmm,’ he plucked it out, holding it up to the light as he looked it over.

  “Grade 10 gem, some form of physical manifestation skill?”

  “Natural Weapons,” Leo blinked, shocked the man could tell all that just by looking. “How did you know?”

  “You learn a thing or two running a gem shop for a few decades,” Gordon said, finally bringing the gem to his chest and inhaling slightly as he poked at it with his soul. “Yes, this is an excellent find. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s on the rarer side is a bit countered by the fact that the Natural Weapons skill is one of the least desired. Few gem holders want the ability to grow claws and pretend to be a magical beast.”

  “I can imagine,” Leo muttered, glancing at Taylor as she struggled to read some of the more complex language on the placards. He’d witnessed Taylor take some devastating blows while lunging at her opponents, and it was only because of her unique soul-body blend that she was able to shrug them off. Any regular gem holder without an incredibly strong body would have been killed ten times over trying to mimic her. “How much then?”

  “I promised my wife just the other day I’d stop picking up gems I had no chance of reselling,” Gordon sighed, carefully placing the gem back in the box and snapping it shut. “I could make you an offer, but I have a feeling you’re not going to like it. Instead, I have a proposition for you. I’m not sure how you got your hands on this gem, but from looking at the two of you, I get the sense that you’re two young gem holders just starting your wild adventures out into the planarverse. How about a trade? In exchange for this gem, I’d be willing to offer you one or two lower-Grade gems, as well as some information. You two may not be all that experienced yet, so trust me when I say that the right information is more than worth its weight in gems.”

  “Information?” Leo repeated. “Do you have some sort of partnership with the town’s Listener?”

  “My boy, I am the town’s Listener,” Gordon chuckled. “Though if you know about Listeners, maybe you’re not a greenhorn like I thought. In smaller planes like ours, it’s common for the Listener to also run the gem shop. All the gem holders are going to swing by at one point or another, after all. Might as well make things easy for them.”

  “That makes sense,” Leo admitted, wondering why neither of his parents had ever mentioned that to him. Granted, there was every chance they had at some point, and he’d simply forgotten. He’d done his best to prepare to become a Cartographer and follow in their footsteps, but it wasn’t as though he had a flawless memory.

  “So, thoughts on the trade?” Gordon prodded.

  “That sounds fair enough… But we do need some money as well. We need to restock some of our supplies while we’re here.”

  “Twist my arm, why don’t you!” Gordon managed with a straight face, before breaking out into a smile. “I think I can manage that just fine. Now then, what is it you want to know? Let’s get the information out of the way first so that we can figure out what Grade gems you can take a look at.”

  “The Frozen Killer,” Leo started, diving straight into it. “Has she been captured by the Planar Lords’ agents yet?”

  “The Frozen Killer?” Gordon repeated, looking taken aback by the question. Narrowing his eyes, he stared a bit more cautiously at Leo. “That’s a very specific question. And not one I would have expected from some random upstart.”

  “I’m just a fan of famous Cartographers,” Leo shrugged, his heart racing as he waited for Gordon to answer. Finally, after weeks of being in the dark, he was going to get an update on how his mother was doing. Part of him wanted to leap across the counter and grab Gordon by the collar, to shake the information he wanted out of the man instead of waiting patiently for a response. Instead, Leo stood there, almost too afraid to hear the next words out of Gordon’s mouth.

  “The Frozen Killer, huh,” Gordon said, rubbing his chin as his look changed to one of surprise, and then understanding. “I’m sorry to have to break the news to a super fan such as yourself, but last I heard… she was gone.”

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