Newly Broke Heroine! [Book One Complete, Cozy Fantasy Adventure]

Fiona flexed her pointy ear, listening in. Even with the elevated sense of hearing, she still couldn't compare to the kitsune, the wolven, and the miniature dragon next to her. "Yeah, it's super faint. Doug, can you make out what they're saying?"

"No. It could be thousands of feet down these winding corridors. We should quiet our approach. It's at least two people," he whispered, his wings tensed.

"Or one person talking to themselves," Darla suggested, tapping one horn rhythmically. "We're still not quite at the boundary between Cepalune and Underlune. Getting close, though."

"How will we know?" Fiona asked. "This is my first time down here."

"The ambient magic changes. You can feel it on your skin." Darla's golden eyes flickered with interest toward the corridor winding down, and she stepped carefully along the worn steps. "I should probably take the lead. You might be the fleet-of-foot elf, but I'm built differently."

"She is," Jake murmured. Darla shot him a scathing look before her lips curved into an evil smile.

"Careful, Jake. Some details can stay between the sheets."

Fiona's face froze for a few seconds, with her hands reflexively patting Doug's horns. He didn't protest this time around, as the others pressed forward. "Oh, she would have been fun," she exhaled with a wicked grin.

"You have me, and I'm almost as prickly," he responded in a gruff tone, staring at her accusingly. "Am I just a conquest to you?"

"No, you're charming, in a weird way." He canted his head at her curiously, then nodded. "For real though, you're not gonna take off into the sunset the second you get your dragon form again, right? Because Bonnie can and probably will find a way to counter whatever Glados did."

He shook his head contentedly as they caught up with the others. "Not without you. It's a courtship thing for a dragon to give a girl her first flight. You haven't scared me away yet, Swiftheart."

That notion made her smile. "Give it a week and see if you feel the same way." The stone passage gave way to a large network of tunnels branching off, and Fiona dimmed the light on her bangle.

Jake put a hand up, and everyone put their hands to their armaments. He motioned to an overlook where a large cavern with a field of tree-sized mushrooms lay before them. "Down there," he said with barely a whisper.

Fiona narrowed her eyes when she saw several men and women lugging around heavy crates from a river that followed the bends of the cavern and out of sight. Several bulky wolven, and a strange, bat-like man helped unload them onto a stone pier. Not only did they have the appearance of mercenaries with matching uniforms, but another detail caught her attention. One that made her smile.

Bingo. The cargo crates were marked in the same way as the ones she'd seen in Karlin's foundry.

"Jake, there aren't many of them. But they do seem well armed…" Bonnie pointed to blades, crossbows, and magical bolt casters, divided among them. "Those armaments look like they're gnomish-made."

"So why's that an issue?" Fiona whispered.

"Because they're one of the few groups that have made weapons that can beat spell barriers. I wouldn't want to test yours against those," she cautioned. "Fi, thoughts?"

She peered through a spyglass that Bonnie handed her, and she surveyed the site. "Okay. I totally have a plan. And no, it doesn't involve charging in like a doomed cavalry brigade."

Meanwhile…

Greg tapped his watch irritably as he stood on the shop floor, attending to the sparser weekend crowd. He'd been against this idea from inception, even with the opportunity to see his father make a meaningful attempt to reestablish speaking terms.

I never should have let them go.

He wasn't the person to run this place. Fiona, despite her eccentricities, danced to some hidden tune that made the vast majority of her ideas work. Was his thinking too rigid, or did she inherit some luck from the theoretical entity on her wrist? Either way, the crowd kept asking where the fiery maned elf was, and her fiery furred kitsune friend.

His answer? 'Away on a business opportunity.'

That somehow made it worse, since Bonnie had gone along with them. She was a highly proficient mage, and knew she could hit as hard as she could cast, in a pinch. He'd, of course, tried the logical reason that Fiona could do this herself. Bonnie had given him the stern finger wag, swishing tail, and pouty muzzle look.

Ultimately, he hadn't pressed further. Bonnie had been more protective of Fiona ever since learning the truth of her origins–an entire cosmos away, on a doomed world. He couldn't imagine how anyone could come out of that intact, let alone sane.

Sane, being a relative term.

He chuckled softly as he remembered her dancing around the previous day, changing the colors of the strings of arcane lights to green, red, and silver, and Bonnie levitating her to reach the tougher spots. They were good friends. They'd watch each other's backs down below. Plus, she had Doug, Jake, and Darla, all quite powerful in their own way.

"I see brooding."

Greg turned to watch Bianca approach after having restocked the shelves and returned from the humanities section. She did that whenever she had idle time, even taking lessons from Doug on the means of construction and their history.

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He tilted his head gently her way. "I don't brood."

Bianca let out a soft laugh, rearranging a few items to be nice and orderly on the shelf near the sales kiosk. "Brooding is universal, Mr. Lockheed. I saw it plenty, back where I was. You keep looking at the front door, wondering when they'll skip back in, shouting excitedly about some adventure gone off kilter. Then either Bonnie or Fiona will take credit for making a big save."

Now she had his attention. "You knew Miss Swiftheart well. She has…limitless energy, is one way to put it. I think it rubs off on Bonnie a little."

"She does that. Sometimes, with the things she pulled off, making that store work when it had no business working? I now wonder if she didn't have some magic of true fortune in her, from before. " Bianca brushed her hair out of her face, and rubbed at the bracer. "I'm...happy she found friends."

That caught him by surprise. "She's more of a...three adventure kind of woman that grows on you."

"Oh, Heavens, that is uncannily accurate. She keeps upbeat. Even with her old man screwing her out of her early adulthood." He was pleased to see her mood brighten, but she raised a bit of a blank spot on Fiona's past. One he'd theorized about for a while.

"She never talks about him." He pondered if that was the reason she didn't want him to fall into his father's web again, pushing forcibly against his every effort.

"She doesn't. I figure she probably told Doug. Maaaaybe Bonnie." Bianca hung her head and let out a scoff. "What a piece of work. Her father had an amazing daughter. Her mother was good-hearted, too. That piece of work ruined her future, so she had to start from the ground up. But Fi's stubborn like that. She never let someone kick her when she was down."

His lips creased into a faint smile. "So I've observed. Remarkably headstrong. And, maybe for the better when she stands up to kings who overstep their bounds, or say what no one else is willing to say."

"Did she ever mention me?" Bianca asked, leaning in.

"Briefly. But not in full detail. She mentioned the shop...said she worked with someone," he summarized, glancing back to the doors where shoppers left, covering their heads against the snowfall. "I understand why, now."

"Oh?"

He let out his realization. "Knowing what I know now? I think she's still a broken heroine on a path to healing. She grieved for her world quietly, and likely, you. What we saw, then? That zaniness was only the part she wanted to show. It was a mask to hide pain. Bonnie always told me she thought there was something wrong. She saw a mask, but not what was behind it."

"Bonnie's smart. I like her. Fi needs an…oh, what's the word," Bianca said with a puff of air, then snapped her fingers. "An emotional anchor. I…had trouble being a balance point."

"She had other friends, yes?" Greg asked.

She nodded, but ran her fingers over chipped nails on her right hand. This answer was uncomfortable to her, most likely. "A few, yeah, mostly guys she met in the guard. Not romantic, but like a brotherly kind of care. She was an only child. She didn't have anyone in her corner in that way growing up. But she had me. Well, most of me."

A few customers breezed through with alchemical items and were gone just as quickly, before she continued. "You know the thing about what I had–have, is? It's been there for a long time. I'd get bursts of brilliance, where I could work all day on art, making beauty in a world that needed it. Sleep became an option. Those were the times I could keep up with her bounciness. I was at the top of the world.

"Then…a week later, I'd look at the same art. I'd see nothing but flaws, and failure. It was like sailing through a foggy sea, nothing to navigate by. Fi was a beacon during those times. But not every light can cut through a fog like that."

Greg considered this thoughtfully. "Have you experienced the same, here, on Cepalune?"

"Not quite the same. Varith is like a magnifying lens. I think when I'm like this? After a few weeks of a baseline? It's not as pronounced; I'm more balanced. Somewhere comfortably in the middle." She glanced at her wrist, likely visualizing the mark. "But with the mark active? It amplifies the extremes. For better, and for worse."

To think this is the same person who tried to incinerate us. He tried not to think of how she could have killed all of them or hurt Bonnie. "But you don't want that."

She screwed her lip tightly, taking one small step back, arms folded tightly "Part of me still does, Greg. Part of me likes that power and control, no matter how much I try to shove it away. I look at Fi, with that gargantuan strength of hers. Without friends, she would have been a destroyer. That's a sobering thought that keeps me honest."

She smiled faintly. "I can't change what happened to me, or things I did, but…I'm glad at least one of us got a fighting chance at something normal."

"You still have that chance," Greg reminded her. "Bonnie's told me she hasn't found much on your…situation."

"Yeah, I've got mysteries. This mark doesn't like being poked," she added in a surly tone. "I'm sure I don't want to know the answers to them, either."

She rubbed at her bracer, peering at it closely. "Hey, Greg, this thing's almost out of charge. I need to add a mana cell to it, so we don't get Mister Broody and dangerous on the staff." She frowned slightly when she checked the cells' power status. "I swore we charged this yesterday. It's supposed to last a week."

"You might want to consider meditation in the meantime. It's what I do. Not in a religious or magical sort of way," he clarified when she raised an eyebrow.

"I don't think meditation is going to help what's going on with my messed-up mind. Have you ever pitched that to Fiona?" she asked, looking hopeful.

He shrugged his shoulders. "It wasn't for lack of trying. But she has toned down the crazy antics. Mostly."

"Mostly?" Bianca asked before grabbing a mana cell from Bonnie's workstation and inserting it into the bracer. She let out a sigh of relief as the device lit up with a soothing glow of energy. "What does 'mostly' mean for her?"

Greg let out a soft chuckle. "I still, to this day, do not understand how she manages to pilfer sweets from everywhere under the sun, and not get caught. Fiona, the snack thief. I think she and Bonnie are doing it together, that's my theory."

Bianca laughed heartily. "Greg, marry that kit, or she might snag Fiona–" she stopped as the bracer beeped again, with an urgent chime. She tapped the mana cell's indicator, and it showed up with a strobing, angry red light. "Hey, uh, Greg? This was full, right?"

"It should have been." He went to Bonnie's workstation, briefly instructing Tami to take over the register, and walked past the half door to her tidy arcane bench. He noted her carefully arranged tools and wands, and a stack of requisitions in an inbox currently overflowing–great prospects for the store, and her reputation. Lex peered over, having been given some safer tasks to prepare rune templates.

"Lex, where are the mana cells?" he asked, after not finding them where they should be.

"Third drawer, on the right. She should have a half-dozen; they're used in a lot of arcane devices," he said before going back to pouring the mold for a rune. "Remind me, Kali probably saved my butt from blowing myself up with a homebrewed alchemy lab."

But Greg wasn't focused on that. The drawer was empty. He checked the others to be thorough. "They're missing." Greg felt a slight twinge of concern and saw Bianca's face edged in anxiety. "I'm sure we can go to the arcanist shop down the row and pick up some cells." Rigby's arcanist hardware, two blocks down, five minutes, if we rush. Plenty of time.

Bonnie explained the bracer merely kept the mark from activating with a suppression field, and the belief was that it couldn't activate on its own–the bracer was akin to putting blinders on a horse, though it was a poor analogy. Bianca would have to not have sovereignty over her own body for that to happen–

The bracer let out a louder chime, and Bianca's eyes shot wide, a twitch creasing her cheek. "Greg? Any chance for an impromptu meditation lesson? Because I think we're going to need it five minutes ago."