It didn’t take long for both of us to be seated in the living room again, once more sipping from cups of hot tea. It was a bit of a blur when exactly we had gone from collapsed on the floor to collapsed in chairs, but I decided not to question it. There were worse ways to recover.

  Then again, despite all of the similarities to earlier, there were plenty of differences too. The entire atmosphere had been flipped on its head. When we’d first walked in, we’d been the powerful adventurers helping out an old woman. Now we had witnessed that same old woman casually display more power than either of us could bring to bear, before going on to act exactly the same.

  “There really were a lot of them. You two did an excellent job,” Mildred continued as I realised I’d zoned out a little. Cassie was in a better state than I was, so she was doing most of the talking. Not that she didn’t normally, but at least there was a reason now.

  “Thanks, Mildred. How… uh. How did you do that?” Cassie asked.

  Mildred rolled her eyes, as though she’d been waiting for this question. “Oh, that. I dabbled in magic in my youth, you know how it is.”

  We did not, in fact, know how it is. However, neither of us really wanted to disagree. I did have one question that I needed answered, though, so I spoke up for the first time. “Why did you need us?”

  Mildred turned to me, gentle smile already on her face. “Whatever do you mean, my dear?”

  I sat up a bit, placing my empty cup on the table ahead of me. I’d reverted back to Lia Prime, which had prompted Mildred to give me some old clothes. Apparently they’d used to belong to her husband, but they fit me perfectly. I wasn’t really sure how to feel about that, but I had more important things on my mind.

  “What I mean is, if you could do that,” I nodded to the basement door, which was once more closed. “What did you need us for?”

  Mildred nodded along as I spoke. “Ah, of course. Bait.”

  Bait?

  “Bait?” I asked.

  “Bait?” Cassie asked as well.

  Glad to see we’re on the same page, I guess.

  “Yes,” Mildred answered simply. “Bait. I’ve had that thing infesting me before. Very elusive. It knows it can’t take me, so I needed someone to lure it out of hiding. Or two someones, as the situation demands.”

  “...You know what they were?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Pond Gremlin, nasty sort. Smarter than it looks, I can promise you that.”

  “Why didn’t you mention any of this when you posted the quest?” Cassie asked. “And why do you keep implying that we were fighting one thing. There were clearly hundreds of those things.”

  Mildred smiled wider. “Well, dear. You weren’t just bait for the Gremlin, you were bait for law enforcement, too. You see, I’m not technically allowed to cast combat magic in a residential area. Besides, if you’d seen this quest posted and it said that you would be ‘bait’, would you have taken it?”

  “Maybe, given that we picked this one at random,” Cassie shot me a sideways look. “Putting aside the worrying parts of your explanation, I do get your point. No one wants to be bait.”

  “Exactly! To answer your second question, the answer is because it is. Each of those little gremlins were each a part of the larger Pond Gremlin hive mind. Why do you think they all attacked at once, the moment you turned aggressive?”

  I shook my head. “What were they- it, sorry- even doing to you? I mean, you said yourself that it couldn’t hurt you.”

  Mildred’s expression turned dour. “Just because it couldn’t physically harm me doesn’t mean it couldn’t hurt me. That monster drank all of my wine.”

  I was a little taken aback by her reasoning. It drank her wine, so she incinerated it beyond recognition. Possibly not the most measured reaction she could have had, but I was willing to just move past it. Cassie, on the other hand, was not.

  “Seriously?” She exclaimed, sitting up in her seat. “That’s it? You sent us in because it drank your wine!?”

  Mildred gave Cassie a disapproving look. “Come now, dearie. I understand that you’re upset, but there’s no need to raise your voi-”

  “Oh, isn’t there?” Cassie interrupted, almost standing. “We could have died down there, but that’s no reason to be rude, is it?”

  I had to be impressed at Cassie’s gall, if not her decision making skills. Then again, she only saw the aftermath of Mildred’s spell, not the event itself. Still, I wasn’t just going to leave her high and dry.

  “That does seem a bit dismissive, Mildred.”

  “Thank you!” Cassie yelled.

  Mildred raised her hands. “Enough! I understand, ladies. Please just stop shouting. I have a cat upstairs, if he was woken for nothing I’d never hear the end of it.”

  Cassie sat back down, but I could tell she was still upset. I understood why, I just couldn’t see myself yelling at someone of Mildred’s calibre. Still, it seemed to be working out for us, so I wasn’t exactly going to complain.

  “How about this,” Mildred said, leaning forward. Then she leaned back again with a wince. “Sorry, I forget I can’t move like I used to sometimes. Regardless, how much are you getting for this job?”

  “Three silver,” Cassie said.

  Mildred seemed take aback. “Really? I offered up twice that amount? How about six. Each. However, you don’t mention my actions to the Guild, and you come back for tea some time. I like company that can stand up for themselves.”

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  Cassie shot me a look, which prompted me to shrug. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Despite her… overreaction when it came to alcohol, as well as her slightly dismissive attitude when it came to our safety, I didn’t mind Mildred.

  “Eight silver each,” Cassie said, sticking out her hand. “One visit per month, for as long as we’re in Meria. Advanced notice when we leave, and we get to see the cat.”

  Mildred smiled. It was just as gentle before, but it just didn’t seem the same after what I’d witnessed her do. “Deal,” she agreed, taking Cassie’s hand and shaking it. “Now, how about some more tea?”

  --------------------------------------

  Tea with Mildred was surprisingly relaxing, after the other events of the morning. We ended up staying for a couple of hours after our deal had been struck, which was long enough for Mildred’s cat Lord Casper to show his fluffy little face. That had been the best part of the visit for me. Lord Casper and I quickly came to an agreement, and he spent the rest of our visit sitting contently on my lap.

  Of course, we did have to go eventually. After so long resting, I was feeling surprisingly energised. I wasn’t sure if it was something to do with my unique constitution or just something Mildred put in her tea. At this point, it was fairly even odds.

  We quickly stopped by the Guild and picked up our three silver reward for completing the quest. It seemed like so much less compared to the sixteen we’d swindled Mildred out of, but every little helped. After making up a story about the events at 48 Leviticus Road, we moved on again. The Guild was nice enough, but it wasn’t worth the risk of running into Simon or someone like him again.

  We ended up just going back to the Warg’s Fang. We didn’t have to worry about payment thanks to Mildred’s little stipend, so we both decided we’d rather just relax for the rest of the day.

  Relaxation came in many forms, however. For both of us, apparently today’s version of relaxation was some form of practise. Specifically, Cassie was doing her level best to memorise our bestiary so we didn’t get caught off-guard again, while I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong with my tentacles before.

  I couldn’t figure out how to get my body to make more of them, though. It wasn’t like I had a horde of tiny monsters to call upon to prompt my body to react the same way, after all.

  I tilted my head as a thought struck me. “Cass?”

  She looked up from the thick bestiary on her lap. “Yeah?”

  “How does your levitation spell work? Like, could you just poke me with it or something?”

  Cassie seemed to consider this, before holding up a hand. “Give me a few minutes, alright?”

  “Yeah, alright,” I said as I turned my gaze inward again.

  Slowly, I tried to manually replicate what I could remember of the tendrils. I wasn’t overly picky with the placement, just growing a little one on my forearm so that I could see it properly.

  The issue was, it was pretty basic. Overall, it was fairly similar to the template that I had already come up with for tentacles and the like, besides the presence of a huge increase in tiny sensory organs. They weren’t especially complex, mostly designed for touch and, to a much lesser extent, heat, but there were loads of them, spread all across the tendril.

  I wasn’t sure why, though. I mean, all it did was make the tentacle hyper sensitive, which honestly wasn’t all that helpful. I jolted upright from shock when I let the tendril drop and it hit the bed, which really wasn’t helpful in a combat scenario.

  I didn’t remember that happening when I was fighting of the Pond Gremlin, though. Sure, I still had my senses toned way down at the time, but with how sensitive this appendage was I probably would have noticed anyway, especially since they weren’t exactly gentle when they moved.

  There had to be something I was missing, but I just couldn’t see what. It wasn’t acting the way they had, as though they could react independently yet were still under my control. It was frustrating. I hadn’t really been stonewalled like this with my shapeshifting before. Even when I’d struggled to take on non-humanoid forms, that had been a mental block, not a comprehension issue. It had always felt pretty natural.

  Yet this felt like a genuine puzzle, something that wasn’t necessarily out of reach so much as it was advanced. At that moment, I felt a prod against my shoulder, jolting at the sudden touch.

  “Yah!” I yelped, turning to see Cassie hiding a laugh behind her hand. “Was that you?” I asked.

  “Yep!” She chirped. She made a little gesture with her left and, almost like she was pointing at me, and I felt more pressure press up against my shoulder.

  “That was fast,” I commented as I wriggled away from the contact. It was surprisingly uncomfortable being prodded by pure, invisible force. My body knew there was something there, but my senses all told me there was nothing. No sight, no sound, no heat. It was weird.

  “Lia, it’s been like twenty minutes,” Cassie shot back as she poked me across the room again.

  “Really? It didn’t feel like that long.”

  “Oh, because your sense of time is perfect,” she drawled.

  “...Okay, I’ll give you that. Still, I’m pretty sure that’s really fast.”

  She waved off my comments. “Nah, it’s fine. It’s a pretty basic adaptation of a spell I already knew, it isn’t complicated or anything.”

  “Sure…” I wasn’t sure I agreed, but if she wanted to play it down I didn’t see any reason to argue. “Anyway, can you do more than one?”

  Cassie raised an eyebrow. “Because that sounds like a fun time. I can do three, take it or leave it.”

  “Yeah, three will do. Just spread them out a bit. I’ll try not to squirm too much.”

  Within moments three prods struck my body, and I immediately felt the urge to writhe in discomfort. It was just so weird. I stuck to my promise though, and did my best not to wriggle. Still, it wasn’t always possible.

  After several minutes of this, my body still hadn’t reacted the way I wanted it to. It had just grown chitin over the areas being poked, or automatically reduced the amount that I felt a given area, or otherwise played defence.

  “Ugh,” I groaned, falling back onto the bed. “It’s not working.”

  Cassie stopped her prodding. “What are you even trying to do?”

  Oh, I didn’t even explain it to her. Whoops.

  “I can’t figure out something my body did on it’s own, when we were fighting the Pond Gremlin, so I’m trying to trick my body into thinking it’s under attack,” I answered.

  “And you needed me to use magic for that because...?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve seen you. I doubt I could trick myself into thinking I was under attack if you were doing anything to me physically.”

  “Hey! I mean, yeah. Still though, rude. What even is it you can’t do?”

  “Tentacles,” I said simply, refocusing on a miniature tendril that I made myself.

  Cassie didn’t say anything for a second. When she did respond, it wasn’t by speaking. Instead, she chose to prod me in the cheek with her new spell.

  I sat up and frowned at her. “You’re never gonna stop doing that now, are you?”

  She poked me again. “Nope! Now cheer up.”

  “Well, if you insist, your majesty,” I joked.

  “I do insist! Come on, get over here!” She patted the bed besides her.

  I rolled to my feet and wandered over, taking a seat beside her. “No, the other side,” she demanded.

  “Yes, my lady,” I muttered as I shuffled over.

  “Now, lean against the headboard,” she ordered.

  “As you wish. May I ask why?” I asked as I shuffled over until I was sat upright against the headboard of the bed.

  “Well you see,” Cassie explained as she picked up the bestiary and flopped down over my legs. “I needed a new seat.”

  “Ah,” I said succinctly. “I see how it is. I’m just furniture to you.”

  “Correct,” Cassie announced as she handed me the bestiary. “Now, want to go through some monsters with me? I’m hoping it’ll help me remember better.”

  I shrugged, not seeing the harm. I was happy to help her, and I’d probably pick something up myself too. “Sure, why not.”

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