After a long day of learning how to fit in out on the hectic sales floor, Seymour was ready for some quiet, peaceful time alone in his new quarters. But the moment he crossed the threshold into his room an unexpected pang of hunger bent him right in half. He groaned and slumped onto his new cot.

  “Nice, you’re comfier than you look.” He sat himself up. “But jeez man, why am I so freaking hungry all of a sudden?”

  The hollow feeling inside Seymour made zero sense, because after the whole episode where he helped Thornton Gring evolve his weird class, he ate very well throughout the rest of the day. It had been someone’s birthday, and as luck would have it the depot loved to throw a good potluck. A legit buffet of alien goodies had been laid out on the second floor, across from Gordon’s cafe, and Seymour had made multiple trips up there to graze on the spread. So it struck him as more than a little bit weird that he suddenly felt so goddamned famished.

  And weirder still, the hungry sensation seemed to be localized not in his stomach but a little bit higher; a tiny, desperate gnawing, closer to his heart than his gut. He might have mistaken it for indigestion, except that there seemed to be an unusually strong emotional element to it – close to full-blown yearning.

  Penny Amberwine had turned out the lights when she left for the night, so Seymour peeled himself off his cot and crossed the room to tap the touch-candle perched on the edge of his workbench. As its flame flickered to life the source of his hunger suddenly became all too obvious.

  There, smack dab in the middle of the work surface, still ensconced in its teacup, sat an alien cactus – presumably the same supposedly sapient succulent with whom he’d entered into a blood pact during his day-long ordeal in the third-floor hedge maze. Somehow, it had found its way into his new digs.

  And right on cue, something he’d read during that ordeal—back when the words had been written in blood-letters—replayed in his mind:

  This hunger didn’t belong to Seymour. The call was coming from inside the cactus.

  “How, though?” he wondered aloud. “How did you get here?”

  Had Penny left it here? As far as he was aware, no one else had been in his room. And he had gleaned from their previous interactions that she possessed a habit of working in the shadows as a sort of puppetmaster. Had the girl somehow stashed the cactus in the weird little grotto where he’d first found it, and had she now relocated the damned thing so that he would rediscover it after wrapping up his first day on the sales team?

  “Feels like a stretch,” he said to the cactus. “Like, maybe she could have smuggled you in here today during her shift, but the hedge maze? The grotto? No way, I’m not seeing it.”

  And at the moment it didn’t really matter how the cactus had ended up here. All he cared about was the way the poor thing had shriveled up like a naked mole rat. The skin, which had previously been a healthy green color when they met in the hedge maze, now looked as gray as a rain cloud over a funeral. The furry stripe of spines which he had come to think of as the thing's lips were flaccid and flat like tear-drenched eye-lashes.

  For a beat Seymour wanted to scream at the ceiling. He felt an unwelcome rush of emotion and old memories. This was how he’d felt as a teenager watching his dad deteriorate across two years of chemo and radiation. A sense of helplessness, but now—instead of experiencing it in regard to his dad’s cancer—Seymour felt like this because of a goddamned cactus in a goddamned teacup.

  He fell to his knees then so that his face was right up close to the sad succulent.

  “Are you there?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”

  No answer came. He wasn't sure why he'd expected one.

  Seymour gently prodded the cactus's skin and it felt saggy, not taught and smooth the way it had back in the maze. Without his help, the thing would die soon – he worried that it might already be beyond saving. He had to act fast.

  Does it need water?

  Sometimes a thought is thunk and right away the thinker knows it was a dumb thing to think. Seymour suddenly found himself in such a moment. This wasn't exactly some big mystery, was it? He could try to avoid the obvious, but he knew the answer.

  “No, dipshit,” he whisper-scolded himself, “it doesn’t want water.”

  The workbench which the cactus sat upon came equipped with dozens of little drawers installed along the underside of the flat work surface, as well as more than a few secret compartments. It also had an attached hutch with shelves containing artificer tools, most of which were of Gnomish design; technomagic. Seymour’s brief apprenticeship under Ridley hadn’t taught him how any of these fancy doohickeys worked, but fortunately he didn’t need anything so elaborate as technomagic for the task currently laid before him.

  Digging around in one of the regular, unhidden drawers, Seymour found a needle and thread. A moment later, he had pricked the thumb on his left hand and proceeded to milk a bright red drop of blood onto the cactus's spiny lips.

  At first, nothing happened and Seymour began to feel dirty and ashamed. And a little bit insane as he stared at the spot where he’d just bled himself onto the cactus. But then the furry lips began to tremble almost imperceptibly and he felt fully sane again, because the cactus was finally drinking his blood. Which was obviously insane. But he decided to ignore that fact for the time being.

  “There you are,” he now whisper-cheered. “Drink up, little buddy.”

  And the hidden spine which had stabbed him during their first encounter darted out again and was much longer than Seymour would have guessed. It was some sort of tentacle and he couldn't react in time before it struck like a cobra and latched onto his forearm. He gasped and stopped milking his thumb. But surprisingly, there wasn't any pain. The sensation actually struck him as oddly pleasant, like a friendly eel planting a wet kiss on his forearm.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Then the blood-writing reappeared in his field of vision to make an unnerving announcement:

  Seymour swooned. He didn't know exactly how much one unit of blood was in terms of human biology, but its instant removal had evidently been enough to make him feel dizzy and weak. The cactus’s feeding-spine unplugged itself from his forearm and slithered back into its hiding place.

  Then, Seymour flinched as the teacup cracked and flaked apart like the shell of a hardboiled egg. The porcelain pieces fell around the base of the cactus, which had suddenly doubled in size. Whereas only a moment before it had been perhaps the size of Seymour's fist, it was suddenly closer in size to both of Seymour's fists, placed one beside the other.

  With the teacup broken into shards, the cactus now sat directly upon the wooden workbench. Its roots were showing, wider than they were deep, looking like a gaggle of dirty, woodsy, tentacle-legs. Out of its cup and naked liked this, it could have been mistaken for some sort of plant-based octopus. A handful of stiff, dangerous-looking spines had emerged from the smooth, previously bald skin—all around a half-inch in length—and a fresh blue stripe had appeared, running perpendicular to the furry lip-spines and forming a cross with the preexisting red-and-yellow stripes.

  The magic in the air suddenly felt tangible, and for a moment Seymour worried that perhaps the cactus had released spores or pollen or whatever the heck they used to reproduce. He didn’t possess the botanical knowledge to be sure how that worked but he definitely didn’t want to inhale any cactus sperm or whatever. He held his arm across his face and breathed into the pit of his elbow.

  But then he realized that the destruction of the teacup had actually been what caused the magical disturbance. Its essence was dispersing in a fine, pale green mist. Still, he kept his mouth and nose buried in his elbow, because it seemed like a good idea not to inhale any magic tea-cup dust, either.

  The alien hunger in his heart had been sated, so the broken cup now became his priority. He’d found it just sitting on the floor upstairs and at the time he had examined it using the schematic-capturing function of his Infringement ability. Now that he had the opportunity, he decided to try and give it a check using his catalogoggles, too. He held up one of the broken pieces and attempted to examine it. It took a moment longer than usual, but finally a description popped up:

  How the catalogoggles came up with these silly descriptions was still something of a mystery to Seymour. It seemed like there was a voice in there—a sapient one, perhaps—but knowing what little he knew about Gnomish technomagic, Seymour suspected it was merely some sort of generative language cantrip.

  Ignoring the weird description, he still found a lot to unpack here. First and foremost was the name of the person who had most-recently inventoried this teacup: Oscar Rusk.

  “Where have I heard that name before?” Seymour’s head swam, trying to figure out what it all meant. And then it hit him: “the topiary tiger. That’s it – when I looked at it with my sanguine sight it said the tiger was the minion of Oscar Rusk.”

  Had this Rusk character actually been the person responsible for leaving the cactus in the grotto for Seymour to find? And if he had, then did that also mean he’d left the Card of the Gambler there, as well?

  Seymour couldn’t help but think back to the way he’d received his first catalyst, the Essence of Invention. It had all been part of some scheme by Melvina and Magnus Malveau to ensure he’d acquire Infringement. Did that mean this most recent mysterious stranger, Oscar Rusk, had known that when Seymour used the Card of the Gambler it would result in Cash Out?

  “Did he know it’d turn me into an Invisible Hand of the Market?”

  But there was more. Seymour also wasn’t sure what to think of the final line of text that had appeared following Rusk’s name, written on the lens of his catalogoggles when he inspected the broken teacup shard:

  “What is that mess of letters supposed to be?”

  The catalogoggles always listed the name of the person who had most recently inventoried an item. In the case of broken items, it appeared that in addition to listing the last person who had inventoried it when it was still whole, it also recorded the name of whoever had done the breaking.

  Seymour leaned in close to the cactus, now twice the size it had been only a short time before. Its sudden growth spurt had shattered the teacup from the inside out.

  “Is that your name?” he asked.

  And then he jumped back and emitted a pitiful yelp.

  Because the cactus had moved. Its furry little lips had smacked – they were continuing to smack. It sounded like a baby suckling. Seymour regained his cool and realized he wouldn’t have been so surprised by its sudden movement, but it had seemed like—

  “Like you were responding to what I just said.” He bent so his face was nearer the cactus. It continued to make its strange kissy/suckling sounds. “Is that what you’re doing right there? With the lip-smacking? Are you confirming that the jumble of letters is your name?”

  Once more, the cactus began smacking its lips, making its excited kissy noises. Seymour felt a warmth swell within him.

  “Let’s try this, Cactus,” he began. “Or wait. You have a name, don’t you?”

  He checked the last entry on his goggles one more time:

  “Alright,” Seymour paused. If that was a name, it was too much of a mess to use. “I'm gonna call you Jerome; you alright with that? Gimme two little kissies for yes and one for no.”

  Without missing a beat, the cactus smacked its lips twice. Seymour was astounded. He could now communicate with the cactus—

  “With Jerome.”

  Right on cue, Jerome the Blood-Drinking Cactus started kissing up a storm, much to Seymour’s delight.