21 - Dregstrider [Cherno]

“What makes you think I can or intend to help you find some wannabe paragon of justice?” she asked, though she fully intended to follow through - if for nothing else, then for curiosity.

For a few seconds, Garvesh stared at her. Then, he stated with utter seriousness: “You’ve got murder in your eyes and you walk like a loaded gun.”

“You flatter me. C’mon, the real reason,” she chuckled, looking at him over her glasses.

“Alright, alright. Imraal told me you’d come. I wouldn’t have made the offer if I didn’t think you could get it done, though. In my line of work, you learn how to take someone’s measure without being able to see their attributes and the like; some call it Soft Appraisal, but I say they’ve got brain-rot if they can’t describe shit without using System words anymore. I’ve made my offer, take it or leave it. With that out of the way - want to pawn something? Buy something? Exchange money?”

“I did come here to exchange my money to begin with,” she said, digging her hand into her pocket in an exaggerated manner, gradually retrieving one of the brass coins and all her remaining rings. Her Entropy spiked sharply with the brass coin.

“Do you change Jas’raban Brass Coins?” she asked as she did this.

A nod: “Of course. Sixteen-to-ten on those, you’ll be pleased to hear I think.”

“Huh. The rate was the same on rings and brass coins at the market.”

“Yeah, no clue why; they also don’t let you change other currencies for Jas’raban coins, only one way, y’notice that? The money seems to just vanish into thin air, and for all the strings I tried to pull, all I got was that some rich fuck keeps buying them en-masse at twice their DD value. Something buggy goin’ on there, tell you what. That bastard is why I offer sixteen-to-ten instead of fourteen.”

“Strange. Might be trying to keep them out of circulation or just hoarding them.”

“All I know is Jas’raban coins screw with tracking magic and corrupt the trackers on other money like CRC rings. You can use ‘em to make pretty good divination wards or even warded DD vessels in a pinch, but making vessel cases out of them is a bit of a waste…”

A gesture of his hand led her eyes to a brass talisman hanging on the wall. Now that she knew, it really did look like an elaborately carved brass coin. A second gesture pointed to an item similar to the brass-encased battery powering her eyebox, with a milky-white stone set inside a brass case that didn’t look at all like it was made from a brass coin. It was lined up next to other, similar “crystal battery” type items, but this one in particular had a thick layer of dust.

She still had no clue what DDs were, but between the solid-state storage devices and fixed-value currency, they didn’t work all too differently from certain types of decentralized money that she had dealt with in Megacity Gamma. “Orenom Credits” came to mind; an evolution of once-maligned crypto-technology into a usable format, backed by real assets. If DDs were a stable store of energy, then it made perfect sense to use them as currency.

“...Right, the money. How much do you want to exchange?”

“These rings, should be around eight-hundred, and one…” she pulled out the rings and coin, then stuck her hand back in her pocket so some of her Entropy could dissipate. “...Two brass coins.”

He slowly ran his scaly fingers across the coins and the string of rings, nodding as he went.

“Good good, no counterfeits or curses,” he nodded. “Wait just a moment.”

Garvesh raised a hand, snapping his fingers, a tiny magical spark flashing with the snap. Loud, stiletto-like clacking and the sloshing of liquid could be heard from beyond the door behind the counter. It opened, and through the gap slipped a… Bug-robot of some sort. It was a nearly one-gallon jar astride six stilt-like limbs, purplish muscle rippling under plates of chitin. A faintly-glowing, pearlescent-white substance swirled about in the jar. At its base was a recessed slot, a lens that projected a seven-digit counter, as well as a mechanical, typewriter-like keypad of numbers and some other controls.

Most importantly, it enlightened her to the meaning of DD. It was a gaudy brand logo on the meat-machine's side - or rather, the valuable info came from its even more obnoxious subtitle.

DREGSTRIDER XL-C

Denatured soulDreg Storage ON THE MOVE!!!

“You want the DDs pure, diluted, or solid-state?” asked the pawnbroker as if Krahe knew what any of those things meant.

“Get me a fresh vessel, put them on it.”

“A burner, I get it. I only sell warded ones so it’ll run you a bit more than usual - twelve-hundred DDs.”

“Bring that down to a thousand.”

“Best I can do is eleven-fifty.”

“Eleven hundred.”

“Deal.”

He took one of several near-identical metal rectangles and placed it into the dregstrider’s slot, hovering his hand over the keypad as he squinted, his free hand’s fingers twitching as he counted in his head.

“Two brass coins and eight-hundred in rings convert to… And then minus eleven-hundred… That’s fourteen-thousand, three-hundred and fourty. Anything else you want to buy?”

She wanted to lambast him for pulling that “what else” schitck, but he was right.

“Show me your Voidkeys,” Krahe said, nodding towards a shelf. Atop it was a heavy, reinforced case with fourteen different voidkeys lined up; left to right, with increasing price tags. She recognized a Jas’raban Voidkey; it was third from the left, with two icepick-like, iron keys left of it. She wondered what exactly the lizard meant when he said his cousin told him of her coming.

“Ranged communication. Radio equivalent? Wired? Telepathy?”

“Uh-huh, sure. Don’t try anything funny,” he agreed, taking the Voidkey case off the shelf.

“The cast-iron ones are good for learners, y’know, if you want your kid to learn the basics of Thaumaturgy but don’t want him doing anything dangerous with it. The Jas’raban Threefolds are the most basic I would recommend for actual use; you used to stumble over these things, but ol’ Audun Sorun bought up so many for his deadman prospectors that you don’t see ‘em too often anymore. I reckon there’s thousands of the things stuck in corpses, way down in Jas’raba. They’re home at least, I suppose.”