Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

a cleverly-concealed hinge. She stepped up to him and Jeb realized the melas woman outsized him by half a foot in height and two feet in width.

“C’mere,” she said, motioning him to follow. “There’s the bounties,” she said, pointing to a rack full of stacks of paper with various pictures of people’s faces and drawings of monsters. “You can take one of each for reference. If I catch you emptying out a stack, or hiding one so no one else sees it, I will break you over my knee. When you finish the job, bring back a piece of them and we’ll run it through Old Grindy. Something about the size of a finger should do. If you got the right guy, we’ll pay you the price listed on the paper. If you killed the wrong guy…”

“Will you break me over your knee?”

“Punishment, somewhere between hard labor and execution, depending on whether the person you dropped was a Citizen.”

“Are there normally this many bounties?” Jeb asked, flipping through the hand-drawn images looking for a monster, but they were few and far between. If Jeb could help it, he didn’t really want to walk up and murder some random guy for a paycheck. At least, not yet.

Most of the pictures were of melas men, including the one who’d bumped into him the night before. Jeb could tell by the shape of the face and the little bones woven into his horns and hair.

Jeb briefly considered killing the guy for profit, but decided against it.

“Normally? No,” Bree said. “But public order sank like a rock ever since the Stitching. The bonanza to the east made fortune hunters crawl out of the woodwork, and wherever fortune hunters go, they bring lawlessness with them. The Split Mountains are practically honeycombed with outlaws.”

“The Split Mountains?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what they were called in your world, but when they got Stitched onto Pharos, they got cut apart and split up, leaving great slices of bare rock hundreds of miles long, ore veins exposed to air like a wench with her skirt blown up and a tattoo showing where to stick it.”

“That’s descriptive,” Jeb said, frowning. He had been in Oregon, so to the east was…

“Oh, I think they were called the Rocky Mountains,” Jeb said.

“That’s a stupid name. Like calling it the ‘dirty dirt’.”

“Not much worse than ‘Split Mountains’, in my opinion,” Jeb fired back. “If there are so many bounties in those mountains, where are all the hunters?”

“Most of ‘em are dead or run off.”

“Umm…”

“The people in those mountains ain’t stupid. You show up on their doorstep, they know either you’re a rival prospector, an outlaw looking to rob their claim, or a bounty hunter looking to claim their head. Sometimes more than one of those things. In any case, the reception ain’t gonna be friendly. Some of ‘em will attack you on sight. Not like there’s any lawmen out there.”

“Oh… I could see how that could be a challenge,” Jeb said, flipping out one of the few monster bounties.

“How about this one?” Jeb said, pointing to the writhing monstrosity depicted on the paper.

“Ah, sand-worm knot. Acting up because the Split Mountains disrupted its territory and now it’s moving its range farther west, into populated towns.” Bree glanced over the paper and shrugged. “It’s not a particularly well-paying job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And you look like you could use a warm-up. Just try not to get eaten.”

“I’ll take i—”

“Bree!” A keegan woman, identifiable by the fanciful tassels on her shoulderpads, swept into the one-room office like a bouncy dynamo. “Bree, we’ve got a new posting!” the skull-faced girl said, shoving a piece of paper that smelled vaguely of ink into the clerk’s hands.

There was no picture on the front, just more of those scribbles that Jeb couldn’t read.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Bree muttered to herself, scanning the bounty.

“What doesn’t?” Jeb asked.

“This!” Bree said, shoving the paper under his nose. “The reward listed here is criminally low! No one in their right mind would take this offer!”

“Maybe that’s the point?” the newcomer asked, peering around Bree’s meaty arms to read the script. “Maybe he doesn’t want her back?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bree responded, shaking her head. “It’s not as though he’s got any other heirs. Maybe he’s putting up a bounty so low in order to buy time to negotiate himself.”

“Or he doesn’t care and this is his way of showing everyone ‘he tried’,” the keegan woman said, making quotation marks in a rather human fashion.

I hate not being able to read, Jeb thought to himself.

“So, umm… What’s the job?” Jeb asked.

Bree gave him a strange look. “This.” She pointed at the paper. “This is the job. What do you not get?”

“What if I told you I can’t read?” Jeb asked.

“Oh, you poor thing! All the humans we’ve dealt with over the last four months have been able to read, so we just assumed—” The keegan woman clicked her tongue and snatched the bounty out of Bree’s hand.

The melas woman grunted and went back to her desk as the newcomer began to read.

“On the eighth of Grent, Seraine Grenore was kidnapped by the outlaw Svek Pederson and company. The reward for the safe return of Seraine will be no less than five imperial gold marks.”

“And that’s low?”

“Svek Pederson is a sand-pirate captain. Works with a crew of at least a dozen men. Like so many other animals, his territory got broken up by the Stitching, and he’s moving into new territory. Causes friction. The man’s at least level thirty, and his crew isn’t far behind. You’d need a half a dozen hunters with a level of, oh, forty or higher to safely claim that bounty. And no level forty would do a job as delicate