Despite still reeling after witnessing the brazen way Penny Amberwine had maneuvered Dragon Dan into giving her a job and the casualness with which he had then straight up incinerated Ridley, Seymour was now going to be expected to somehow focus on his sales training. This was only his fourth day of employment, but it felt like he’d been working at the depot for much longer.

  Would it always be like this? Would every day bring some radical new weirdness? He’d come in on his first day to work a temp gig and found himself assigned to perform an impossible inventory. Then, on his second day, while chipping away at the insurmountable inventory, he’d wound up trapped within an endless hedge maze where he fought a topiary tiger and kinda sorta accidentally stole a catalyst. That near catastrophe and the subsequent theft that he’d prematurely admitted to had somehow earned him a promotion of sorts to a permanent position as Ridley’s apprentice, along with the privilege of living on-site.

  And then, on his third day, Ridley tried to kill him!

  Which earned me a legit promotion to sales dude. He shook his head and scoffed. And I still get to stay overnight here in the artificer’s workshop, but now I'll be sharing the space with that cute-but-devious Penny girl instead of ol’ Ridley James Ridley. Talk about an upgrade.

  After showing Penny to her new workshop, Eusebio joined Seymour on the sales floor. “You’ve had yourself an interesting first couple of days here at the depot, haven’t you?”

  “You can say that again. And hey man, I just want you and Dan to know that I had no idea Penny was going to do some light blackmail to get hired on here. I didn’t even know she wanted Ridley’s gig.”

  “No worries, we’ve had our eyes on her for a while and are happy to finally bring her on board.”

  “Seriously?” Seymour’s mind raced, struggling to assemble a puzzle that was still missing some pieces. “Are you saying you and Dan somehow set all this up?”

  “In a way.” Eusebio nodded. “We suspected she’d be attracted by the opportunity to expose Ridley. But we did not predict the means by which she’d do so, nor the ‘light blackmail’ she attempted to perform, to use your phrase. I expect she will go far here, having already demonstrated her willingness to go above and beyond the law.”

  “So wait, you’re saying her attempt to blackmail Dan was actually a good thing?”

  “You may come to find that advancing your career here at the Adventure Depot will require you to do so by any means necessary. And that includes means which some might consider…. unsavory.” He smiled. “In fact, consider that the first lesson of your sales training. Are you ready to get started?”

  “Yeah, let’s do this.”

  First, Eusebio took some time to give Seymour a more in-depth tour of the showroom, including the testing chambers and the vault. Then, he had Seymour check out a few customers under close supervision, guiding him through basic transactions.

  Eventually in the course of this training, Eusebio ordered Seymour to shadow one of the more experienced salespeople. He watched from a safe distance while a sexy ice golem named Sarevja sold soap to an orc. He’d seen her around during the days prior – her literal statuesque beauty made her impossible to miss. While watching her work, Seymour decided there would be no harm in using his freaky Sanguine Sight ability to take a peek under her metaphorical hood:

  She looked early-to-mid twenties, maybe, just a bit younger than Seymour, but he knew that meant she was likely much, much older. The Oberai—he’d learned from Dathon, who had always loved to share factoids he’d gleaned from all his reading, oftentimes costing Seymour sleep—were a race of people from the South and everyone claimed they were immortal. Hardier by magnitudes than humans, they never grew ill and were completely immune to poison. It was also rumored that if an Oberai was struck down in battle, their spirit would return to the caves of their ancestral origin, and a fresh body would be born anew from the rock itself.

  Seymour could barely concentrate on observing Sarevja’s sales tactics. She was just too beautiful, like a living sculpture but somehow the effect wasn’t uncanny. Her hair appeared to be made from strands of verdant jade and her skin was perfectly smooth and pale blue. The Oberai all stood tall and fit and their movements were full of poetry; water coursing over a glacier.

  She wore a loose-fitting, flowing garment that looked something like a kimono with a hooded cloak attached. Artistically embellished images of forests and streams had been embroidered all over it, along with birds and fish and other weird, fantasyland woodland creatures.

  By contrast, her orc customer resembled a lumbering stack of rock-hard muscles, his shoulders nearly as broad as he was tall. His dark gray skin reminded Seymour of the ash-pile Ridley had become and he was perfectly bald but for a scraggly black beard which hung from his jaw the way algae clings to the side of a neglected boat.

  He wore a full-body suit of splinted mail which appeared to be made from the yellowed bones of some humongous beast, with a pair of suspiciously human-looking skulls adorning each shoulder as epaulets. A massive great ax was strapped to his back, also apparently forged from the bones of a great beast. This orc dude was the single most terrifying customer Seymour had seen so far at Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot, and his name was Rathbone Killmaim.

  “Mr. Killmaim, you must remember that your enemies have eyes and ears, yes – but many also have noses.” Sarevja held a bar of smooth, cream-colored soap. “And let me assure you: they all smell you coming, the same as I did.”

  “It is the scent of danger,” the orc boasted, thumping a huge fist upon his breast. His voice sounded like gravel falling into a haunted well which was dry except for a shallow pool of cold blood congealing in its darkest depths.

  “You don’t worry that your odor might alert enemies to your presence, possibly giving them time to set up an ambush?” She looked at the orc with skepticism written on her chiseled, angular, Oberai features.

  “The musk of Rathbone Killmaim demoralizes his opponents.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Sarevja began, a sly grin on her voice, “but neither do I doubt that it has a similar effect on the females of your tribe. I notice you still wear the beard of a bachelor.”

  Rathbone reached up and touched his gross beard. A look of concern swept across his face. Seymour blinked in surprise. Somehow, it appeared that Sarevja had managed to mine out a lode of insecurity from within the seemingly invincible orc.

  “Make no mistake, ice-maiden.Your words do not in any way injure Rathbone Killmaim, but perhaps there is some truth to what you say.” On the counter lay a thick stack of enchanted bandages, which had originally been all the orc intended to buy today. But now he tapped the counter and said, “give me two bars of the soap.”

  A single bar of the stuff would quite literally have lasted him forever, but Sarevja wasn’t going to try to educate this stinky brute out of a sale. She bagged the items in a sackcloth pouch which had Dragon Dan’s silhouette embroidered on the side and a simple cord to cinch it closed. Killmaim produced a roll of imperial chits and peeled off a few, laying the requisite sum on the counter. Sarevja completed the transaction by counting the chits again herself before handing the sackcloth pouch over to the orc.

  “Thank you, Mr. Killmaim,” she said, “come see us again soon.”

  He nodded with a grunt and took his things and left. When he was finally out of earshot, Seymour congratulated Sarevja on a job well done:

  “You really got into his head.”

  “Knowing your customer and predicting their unspoken needs is the key to upselling,” she explained. “That hideous beard of his screamed, ‘virgin’.”

  “You mean he—”

  “Yes,” she began, a wry smirk spreading across her deep-blue lips. “Male orcs lose their beards the first time they copulate and are never again able to regrow them.”

  “That’s weird. Right? Like, very, very weird. Even for a fantasy world.”

  “Not particularly. And this is simply a world to your customers, not a fantasy world. I’d recommend you try to accept that fact, and furthermore I’d suggest you study up on the mating habits of the species who inhabit this realm and the peculiarities found therein. One thing sells above all else.”

  “Sex, right?”

  “Close.” She smiled, suddenly moving near and invading Seymour’s personal space. She put her lips right up next to his ear and his whole body tingled with goosebumps as she whispered, “it’s the possibility of sex.”

  She withdrew and winked at him. Seymour couldn’t make words, so his jaw worked silently while Sarevja strutted off on the way to her next sale and he was helpless to perform any task aside from watching her go.

  “So now you understand why you and I stepped back on that one,” Eusebio said, approaching from the other side of the counter. He was dressed more professionally today though still quite casual, Seymour thought, in a burgundy shirt with plum buttons open at the collar and breezy, tan linen pants.

  A dark-haired young man trailed after him wearing a simple green tunic and a matching Robin Hood cap-thing with what appeared to be a big ass turkey feather stuck in it. Seymour nodded at the young man in acknowledgement before addressing Eusebio’s lesson. They’d been drilling the soap as an add-on sale all morning, pitching it to every single customer who came to the counter. According to Eusebio, they were building Seymour’s Sales Toolbox.

  “Sarevja was the right tool for the job,” Seymour extrapolated, unpacking what he had deduced from Eusebio’s latest lesson. “Killmaim there probably would have cleaved you or I in half if we’d said anything about his body odor, let alone his beard.”

  “That’s precisely right, and it’s also why we don’t work on commission. If you’re not the best person to help the customer, always seek out the colleague who is.”

  “Oh, so we’re finally colleagues now?” Seymour teased.

  The young man standing behind Eusebio cleared his throat. He was clutching a knot of sticks to his chest like it was his prized possession. Whatever that thing was, it reminded Seymour a bit too much of the tiger he’d fought in the hedge maze.

  Eusebio turned and apologized. “Sorry, Thornton. You probably want to get on with your business rather than being forced to listen to our banal shoptalk.”

  “Well yes, sir, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “Not in the least.” Eusebio directed him up to the counter, guiding him with a hand placed amicably upon his shoulder. “Seymour here will help you out with a fair price for your family heirloom.” He shot Seymour a quick nod as he backed away. “I’ll stay nearby in case you have questions.”

  Seymour had helped check out a handful of customers at this point, but he had yet to actually perform an intake on a new item. Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot manufactured nothing on its own, relying on what Eusebio had dubbed a Two Bucket Formula for acquiring merchandise.

  The First Bucket of Acquisition was the local dungeon buried directly beneath them at that very moment, hidden away in the deepest depths of Vol’kara. Innumerable treasures had been plumbed from its depths over the course of centuries, along with mountainous heaps of gold coins, for which the shop offered the most favorable money-changing service around. There was status to be gained through possessing vast sums of gold, but the majority of shops set up in Heschia’s cities only accepted imperial chits.

  This was a pay-to-win world, and the young man standing before Seymour right then was a perfect example of that. The knot of sticks which he kept clutched close to his heart would likely count as the most valuable thing his family possessed, and he’d been sent to Dragon Dan’s to sell it.

  To establish what Eusebio called The Second Bucket of Acquisition had required building a reputation across centuries as the most lucrative shop for a regular, non-adventuring citizen to sell their magical wares. Regular folks, virtuous and non-virtuous alike, traveled from far and wide to redeem their family heirlooms for chits. Seymour figured this practice of buying up people’s random heirloom artificery was probably why the third floor looked like the backroom in a pawn shop – at least when it wasn’t transformed into a hedge maze.

  “I saw you checking out that Oberai girl,” said the young man. Eusebio had called him Thornton.

  “You caught me.” Seymour held up his hands, miming what it turned out was multiversal sign-language for, I’m busted. “But can you blame me?”

  “You know she’s probably four-hundred years old, right?” The young man laughed, and Seymour smiled.

  Rapport established, he thought. Now let’s see if we can upsell this goober on some soap.