Chapter 60: Ch. 59 – Money, Money, Money, Must be Funny, in a Rich Momo’s World!

“Deal with me?” Momo squeaked. Morgana had given her new defenses against Dark magic, but Vivienne was pure holy light. The room was too cramped to outrun a light beam – not to mention that Argent was on cooldown. She’d be skewered in a second. She began to sweat, running out of options.

“Oh, relax,” Vivienne rolled her eyes. “Not like that. I meant we need to compensate you for your help. Unlike Nia, I believe in honest work receiving honest pay. We wouldn’t have been able to retrieve Sera without you.”

The Holy Knight seemed begrudgingly grateful, as if the words were coiled around painful spikes. She chewed her lip and looked up at Momo, impatiently awaiting her answer.

“Oh,” Momo said, blinking dumbly. So she wasn't about to die. Nice. “Are you sure you’re not just trapping me into some other elaborate scheme?”

“Honestly, I can’t be sure,” Vivienne shrugged. “Elaborate schemes are the only thing I’ve thought about for the last ten years. It’s kind of hard to turn off. But if it comforts you, I don’t think I am.”

It did not comfort Momo. She looked towards Nia, who she trusted even less.

“My sister isn’t the generous type. I’d take her up on the offer,” Nia said, looking ever so often at the Pol's body, splayed awkwardly on the floor. “I’ll be following, of course. If Sera doesn’t want to give me a reward, I’ll simply reward myself. I assume we’ll be emptying the vaults?”

“Naturally," Vivienne answered.

The Con Artists would be furious. Momo swallowed. As much as she would love a glorious amount of money, she wasn’t interested in making a glorious amount of enemies when they were released from the cage. Assuming they were released. Momo was still fairly unclear on just how ‘fair’ this new regime was going to be.

All she knew was she couldn’t stay long. A warning from a Goddess wasn’t to be taken lightly.

“I have to get my letter first,” Momo swallowed. If everything took a turn for the worse, or, rather, worser, she wanted to at least have the envelope in hand. She’d rather be Sera’s slave than disappoint Valerica by losing the one quest item she gave her.

“Fine,” Vivienne waved her off. “But don’t dally. We should get back to Sera before she turns all the knights to zombies out of boredom.”

Momo nodded, heading hastily towards the storage room.

—

She was eternally grateful that the knights were slobs.

The place hadn’t been touched – and certainly not cleaned – since she left it. If anything, it had only increased its collection of dust and cobwebs. With Dusk’s aid, she found the letter in minutes, collected under the gold pieces she had left to rust.

She looked down at her robes. Damn it. She still didn’t have anything to carry the leftover gold in. Even the envelope was at risk of falling out again – her pockets were about as trustworthy as a backpack with a rip down the middle. Still, she wasn’t about to leave it a second time.

Maybe I can get a nice backpack as a reward, she thought. Whatever the North Face equivalent of Alois was – something fashionable, yet sporty. She could even carry Dusk in it! How cute would that be? The cat’s little snout sticking out of the bag, meowing as they walked. It was certainly preferable to carrying her around on her shoulders all the time.

It was decided. Momo was getting a magical backpack.

With the letter in hand, she headed back to Vivienne and Nia. They were nearly out of the room, waiting impatiently by the door.

“We don’t have all day,” Vivienne glared. Momo squeaked out an apology, running after them as they headed back up the stairs.

She had the letter, and the promise of a reward. Now all she had to do was avoid getting enslaved by Sera - and the wrath of a jealous Con Artist.

—

“The vaults are down this way,” Vivienne instructed as they passed the Judgement Room. Momo blew out a breath, grateful they weren’t making a pitstop to greet Sera again. The Necropriest was obviously busy redecorating. Skeletons, hung on flowery nooses, were arranged all over the walls like interior decoration. Everything was painted Nether black, just as she instructed.

Septim made a far more efficient zombie than he did a human knight, Momo mused.

The most astonishing change was the Mage’s Tower. Momo could see it through the large windows that ran down the hallway. A majestic, pure-black steeple, it hung over the horizon far above any other building in Nam’Dal. It had to be quadruple its original size, and Sera had managed to rebuild it in just an hour.

Nether seemed like a dangerously efficient building material, but there was no way it was safe. Structures built out of the material of the afterlife? Momo couldn't imagine trying to explain this to an American pastor. Still, it was undoubtedly beautiful. Totally and completely black. Light died upon contact with the surface, as if the structure was eating the sunray alive.

Momo wondered if she could build her own palace out of pure Nether. It sounded cozy.

Nia and Vivienne took a sharp left turn, and Momo nearly face-planted into the wall as a consequence. She didn’t realize the hallway even had a left to take. Surrounded by cobbled stone, it appeared like a dead end.

She should have learned that lesson by now, though: nothing was as it seemed with Nia and Vivienne. They reminded Momo of the bluntly mean (but surprisingly smart) popular girls from high school, except these two swore themselves to Necropriest Sera, instead of Beer-Enjoyer Matthew.

Removing a rectangular stone from the wall, Vivienne scowled in disgust as liquid Nether ran over her hand. It stained her nail beds, coloring her skin.

“It’s so sticky,” she groaned.

“That [Holy Knight] training really got to you, didn’t it?” Nia teased. She removed a few more stones with ease, unaffected by the black oil slopping onto her fingers. Unlike real paint, the Nether didn’t stick properly to the surface. It just went wherever it pleased.

With the stones tossed aside, the hollowed-out wall formed into a hallway. Is this another secret passageway? Momo thought as the pair stalked leisurely inside. Nia’s stolen blueprint of the castle seemed less impressive to Momo now – given that her literal sister was in charge of the whole affair. It had hardly been an impressive theft, and more of a confusing act of nepotism.

They strolled down the dark hallway until they reached a door with a wheel at the center. Vivienne turned it, and a shuttering sound echoed around the room. The walls of the hallway began to quake, then shutter, and then finally begin to descend. Momo looked around, wide-eyed in awe, as the stones lowered slowly towards the floor with every crank of the wheel-lever.

“This place has some crazy engineering,” she muttered. Vivienne laughed.

“Thank you.”

“You didn’t…” Momo stuttered, “...design it, did you?”

“Of course I did. I'm an engineer by trade. Nam’Dal was a barely-functioning slum before I rose to power,” she claimed. “Now it’s a slum with excellent infrastructure.”

That was surely… one version of events. She was sure the Rats would beg to differ who had kept things running.

As Vivienne cranked the wheel a final time, the stone walls collapsed completely into the floor. Mechanical gears whirred, and a set of shelves started extruding from the walls. They were simple shelves made of wood, stuffed to the brink with paper. Momo’s eyes widened, and she got to her knees to examine the bills.

They were small and red, with the King’s insignia embossed in the center. A Nam’Dal banknote.

“How much is this worth?” she whispered.

“About a hundred gold coin,” Nia answered, squatting down next to her. She laughed at Momo’s subsequent expression. “Don’t look so impressed. That’s the smallest denomination in here.”

“Smallest?”

Momo's vision darkened, dizzy with the dollar signs that had started to color her eyeballs.

She had a few thousand gold coins to her name – her life’s savings – but there were enough red bills in this storage cell alone to get her to ten thousand. From above Momo, Nia had already moved on from the red bills, grabbing a handful of yellow banknotes from the shelf above her. They gleamed like solid gold.

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“These are worth a thousand,” Nia grinned, and tossed one to Momo without a thought. Momo caught it rabidly out of the air, stuffing it in her pockets without a thought. When Nia turned away, Momo shoveled as many golden bills in her pockets as would fit. They had the benefit of being both light and thin, so she could crumple a good hundred of them into her robes.

I’m rich. She thought, adrenaline coursing through her veins. She could afford a bed now.

“Slow down, tiger,” Nia laughed, strolling further down the corridor. Knowing it was always best to follow in a thief’s footsteps when in a treasure vault, Momo followed in tow. Nia stopped at one of the last containers, which held green colored banknotes. Momo wanted to laugh – they looked nearly like US dollars.

The appearance of them transported her back in time. She could barely remember the feel of a dollar. How it felt in her hands. How it felt to stop by the corner stone and spend a handful on a cup of instant ramen. It was insane just how fast she had been forced to adapt to her new circumstances. She wouldn’t have been able to pronounce Necropriest back on Earth; now look at her. She was so far out of her original comfort zone, it was almost unfathomable. She couldn’t even imagine explaining her average day to her parents. It’d probably kill them.

“Are you ready for what these are worth?” Nia grinned villainously.

“No,” Momo trembled, her hand already reaching for the bill.

“Finders keepers,” Nia grinned, snatching the bill just out of her grasp. “It’s worth ten thousand coin.”

Momo nearly fainted then and there.

“How many can I have?” she mumbled. She hoped the answer was everything.

“As many as you can hold in those tattered pockets,” Nia laughed.

Momo reached out, then paused.

“This has to be a trap,” she said.

“I mean, this is as real as money gets,” Nia shrugged, following Vivienne further down the hallway. “Sure, we could be setting you up – but it’s exclusively up to you if you come out of this chamber rich or poor, dead or alive.”

Momo moaned internally. She was quite exhausted by these sisters and their riddles. Couldn’t someone just be straightforward with her for once? She thought of Radu – who had told her, almost immediately, that he was a Con Artist. Looking back, he was as blunt a salesman as any respectable shop owner. She found herself missing him.

He probably feels the same, she thought, remembering that he was currently locked up in a cage under threat by one of the world’s most powerful necromancers. Shit. She had made him a promise: he had her back, and she had his.

She couldn’t just leave him there.

Momo sighed. Having friends was exhausting. She knew there was a reason she tried to avoid it back on Earth.

Trap or no trap, she loaded up on as many of the green bills as possible. Surveying the rest of the shelves, which spiraled upwards just past her head, there didn’t seem to be any higher denominations. For a vault containing such an insane amount of money – it was laughably simple, like a toddler’s imagination of a bank. She felt like she was playing with Monopoly money.

“This is just the treasury,” Vivienne said, strolling further down the hallway. “The next room has the real fun stuff.”

Fun stuff? Momo was scared to imagine what Vivienne thought was fun.

She followed Nia and Vivienne until they reached another other door, which required a magical incantation. Vivienne quickly obliged, speaking in words Momo couldn't understand until the door clicked open. The woman seemed to have a fascination with the interaction between the physical and the magical – with each of the doors requiring a mixture of both to successfully unlock.

The next room was much wider, and Momo’s jaw nearly dropped at the contents: armor, weapons – everything a young Knight would dream of. There was an entire chamber dedicated to battleaxes, another to knives, one to heavy armor, and finally…

Momo yelped. Standing in the middle chamber was a man in a cloak, brushing off the dust from the weapon hangers.

“Ah, I see you followed instructions,” Vivienne grinned. “It’s good to see Sera didn’t gobble you up, Extrius.”

The man slowly turned, and a green, leathery neck peeked out from his black clothes. He dropped his face-shielding cowl, and the head of a turtle blinked back at her. Yes, a turtle. Draped in black, with an Executioner’s Axe steady in his left hand.

“The revolution was a nice opportunity to clean up down here,” he said slowly, with the enunciation of a sloth. He absentmindedly itched the back of his cloak, a bulbous thing – which Momo had originally thought was a bad back, but now realized was a shell.

“Your executioner… is a turtle?” Momo said, no longer surprised.

“Turtling,” he corrected her, because of course.

“Just how many halflings exist? And why are they all in this city?” Momo asked miserably. She thought she had identified all of them. Birds, rats, lizards. That was quite enough half-animal insanity.

“Oh, as many as there are stars in the sky,” the turtle replied simply. “We halflings descend from the Great Elder Animals of Alois, the original species of this continent. You know, it was humans that were the anomaly. No one seems to remember that.”

He had a kindness to him, in his big eyes and his slow, methodical speech. Momo couldn’t imagine this guy chopping heads off.

Then again, she could barely imagine Valerica leading a necromancer cult. She had the personality of an overexcited English teacher with weird eating habits. If it wasn't for her obsession with dead bugs, and her collection of skeletons, she'd fit in as an average overzealous High School teacher. One of the varieties that liked to assign impossible assignments with impossible deadlines.

“Right,” Momo nodded, absorbing the halfling lore. “Thank you for enlightening me.”

He smiled a bit, and continued his dusting.

“Alright, Momo,” Vivienne said, commanding her attention. “Take whichever items you want – and can reasonably carry. I figure we’ve put you through enough to justify it. But only three items maximum, please. A city requires a full vault of magical items to be considered viable.”

“Whichever she wants?” Nia complained. “Me too, I assume?”

“An incorrect assumption,” Vivienne glared. “You’d somehow manage to take everything in the chamber, and then some.”

Nia groaned, but Momo was no longer listening. She was already on the move, like a kid in a candy store. She was not going to let this opportunity pass her by.

She went into the armor chamber first. It was mostly suits of traditional heavy armor, but there was a small corner with enchanted leather armor, boots, backpacks…

She audibly gasped, running up to the leather strapped bag. Her prayers had been answered. Not only was it a backpack, but it was the perfect backpack. It was soft to the touch, durable, and light. It was a pleasant, inconspicuous brown – wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, just like Momo liked. The only peculiar thing about it was the strange symbol etched into the back.

Written in a deep red, it looked almost like an Ancient Egyptian word – like hieroglyphs. Momo remembered seeing that writing somewhere, but she couldn’t place where. Inside, the bag was a similar, garnet-colored red. It was exquisite, but had a subtly eerie aura to it.

Was this… a necromancer’s bag?

She put it around her shoulders, successfully equipped. A piece of parchment came flying in, as expected.

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