Isaac knew something was up that morning the moment Jessica swung open his doors and marshalled in with those heavy boots of hers with a sour look on her face. She had sent a barely intelligible grumbled out greeting his way as she headed straight for the lounge.
Like every good host and friend, he had brought her a glass of soft wine from one of those brands she recently got to love, and had asked her the reason for her mood.
He expected the rebuttal and redirections, braced himself even for the harsh words, and had made a mental note of her current state and the distinct fluctuations. What he hadn't expected was a complete shutout.
Plainly speaking, the Jessica he had known to this point was not a person who did shutouts. Punch outs, yes. Insults and general verbal assaults, doubly so. She did not lean on a table in a silent streak and battled her woes silently.
Maybe she was… changing? She had bought quite a few things from him, a good number of them were substantial, so a change was expected. Growth too — after all, that was the essence of his job as a Merchant.
So he left her to herself and tended to the shop, all the while having his specters keep a casual eye on her. It was a relatively average day when it came to sales and visiting customers and that was perfectly okay. After all, the more the slow days, the better the thrill when those fast days with high traffic rolled over.
Jessica had gotten over her mood after two hours of silence but it was pretty clear that she still felt down. It was a visible and upsetting difference when compared to her usual mood.
"You alright now?" Isaac had asked when he found her sometime in the evening, swirling her third glass of wine.
"Not really." She had said with all the strength of a dying cat. She sighed. It was a deep sigh of frustration and belated realization that she was straying too far from her character template. "Ugh, it's one of those days."
She gave him the glass of unfinished wine which he graciously took and sent to one of the numerous enchanted/cursed dishwashers in the backrooms.
"I could tell." She had snorted at his words as she sat upright, inviting him to sit, an offer he graciously accepted. "So? Feeling up to it?"
She snickered, which promptly fell to a short laugh, while shaking her head in amusement. "What? Trying to be my therapist for the day? I don't think I can afford your brand of shrink."
"While I do have the certifications, that's not what I'm trying to do and you know it." A specter materialized and set down a plate of sliced fruits in front of him which he started nibbling on. He then asked again. "So? Feeling up to it?"
"Nah," she said with a shake of her head. "I'm probably making a big deal of nothing. It just happened to catch me at a bad time."
She shoulder checked him with a smirk. "I'm fine. Though thanks for worrying, I guess. You left your counter twice to check on me. Does that make me one of your top valued customers?"
He rolled his eyes and stood up upon seeing that she was manually migrating back to her normal self. "Eh, somewhere in between." His hands made a so-so gesture.
"You're not terribly busy, are you?" She asked almost offhandedly.
He looked at her with a raised brow, especially at the very familiar question. His reply was the very familiar 'it's still working hours' to which she replied with a sarcastic 'I can see that'.
"Seriously though, can't you lock up early for a single day? I doubt you'd be breaking any 'Union rules' as you so love to put it." She threw the last of the rainbow-colored grapes into her mouth. "Come on, just for a few hours. I know a pretty sick bar."
For a moment he had wanted to regurgitate the next line of his usual responses to this branch of questioning but he paused for a moment, a moment Jessica didn't miss as she took that chance to whine dramatically.
"I could use a casual stroll." She had looked at him in shock as if his response was something she never expected.
That was how she hastily dragged him out of his shop before he could change his mind. He still made sure to let her know that he would instantly return if a customer walks through the door. She didn't care either way as she dragged him out.
That was the progression of events that led him to his current activity of walking around aimlessly while trying anything that Jessica wanted him to try, even though she knew that he wasn't exactly a stranger to anything around them.
"You're in an awfully good mood for a simple walk."
She gave him a half shrug and spat out the empty stick of a lollipop at a tree, grinning to herself when she saw it sink halfway deep into the stump. "Well I won a bet I made with myself. 'Getting Isaac to leave his shop in three months before he fucks off to his next dimension or bumfuck-who-knows'."
"And what did you win?" He asked simply for the sake of asking. He doubted he would be understanding more than the broad strokes of Jessica's thought processes anytime soon.
"How the fuck would I know?" The thought seemed to amuse her into a short laugh. "So do you have anything particular in mind?"
Isaac sighed. "I should have stayed in the shop." He groaned. Nothing about the city was remotely interesting. It was as mundane as a mundane human city could get. Absolutely nothing piqued his curiosity. "I'm not a Neanderthal, Jess. Bar fights and street food vendors aren't exactly new experiences."
"Oh shut up, Merchant. I didn't ask for a tourist review so keep the curated speech for someone else." Her irritated scowl proved effective as it opened the way in front of her and Isaac as the denizens proved smart enough to avoid her moods. "It's a stroll. You got anywhere in mind to go? Simple."
He made an exaggerated roll of his eyes. "Then the answer is no." To him, this had been a complete waste of time but he kept that particular sentiment from going vocal. It was a simple walk, not tourist sightseeing.
"I've been meaning to ask. Now that you're out of the shop, what exactly can you do? Are you still super powerful and an uber dickhead? Or is it some kind of nerf?"
"Meh, it's whatever." He replied nonchalantly.
She didn't seem to appreciate the stiff reply so she kicked at his shin which he sidestepped with a loud sigh which seemed to annoy her even more.
"If you're that bored then simply teleport back to your booth. Stop breathing down my neck because I'm trying to keep you engaged."
"Yeah, that's my bad. Sorry." He dialed his perception as well as most of his senses down to a level where they stopped disregarding mundane things outside the confines of the shop. He put the Merchant in the backseat and logged in 'Isaac' as the primary user ID.
It was more of a mental switch than anything that exciting. So when he turned to Jessica and she saw the faint smile on his face, she looked visibly unsettled.
"What the hell did you do, man? Did you just flip a switch?" She shook her head in stunned disbelief as she instantly noticed the changes. "You're weird as fuck, dude."
"Okay now you're just saying that to be mean." His mundane-adjacent senses now picked up on the atmosphere and the things around them instead of disregarding it.
Jessica absentmindedly adjusted her leather jacket as a chilly wind blew over, before leading him into a bar.
She picked up two cold bottles from the counter for them and joined Isaac in a table at the corner of the bar with a clear view of the TV and the main area.
"How about a game to pass time?"
"Sure."
Isaac brought out a roll of pictured cards and set it on the table between them. "This is Gwent."
He explained the rules to her and told her of the different unit cards, their special attributes and the strategies that favored them. Gwent wasn't a hard game to get into, and even mastering it was all about how many complex patterns you could form in your head from the set pieces.
At any level, Gwent was an easily enjoyable game as a novice would easily enjoy playing against an experienced hand just because of the fun applications one could make with their cards.
"Wait, so you're like super super old." She kept her voice down to a hushed whisper but the exclamation was present in her words. "I thought you were like a couple hundred years old at least."
"Definitely not." Isaac remarked with a chuckle, an amused smile playing across his face. "I can't even call that young when it comes to Merchants. A Merchant still in their hundreds are basically still zygotes. Not even infants."
"Get out!"
"I'm being serious." He said as he played a winter card. She smiled and put down a leader card that nullified the frost effect.
"So how old are you? A couple thousand? Less than a dozen?" She was strangely very interested in his passage of time but he simply took it as another bout of her heavy dose curiosity.
"Older, but that's the only thing I'm going to say concerning that so stop guessing." He put down a spy card which earned him a playfully suspicious look.
"Come on, bud, you can't just leave me hanging." She begged after finishing another bottle of beer and adding it to the other dozen bottles on their table.
Her pleas fell on deaf ears and seeing that Isaac had zero intentions of budging on it, she relented and proceeded to ask him about something else.
"How does being a Merchant even work?"
"Can't disclose the details of the nature of employment or the nature of the Union."
"Do you pay taxes to the government or your employers?"
"Financial information between the employer and the employee are not to be shared with outside parties not under said constitutional umbrella."
"How does one even get recruited as a Merchant? Is there like a dimensional headquarters that sends out field agents with recruitment quotas?"
"Can't disclose the details of the nature of employment or the nature of the Union."
She tried her best, he would give her that, but Union rules were an opponent she couldn't beat. She grew increasingly frustrated when he calmly rebuffed every line of questioning she threw at him.
"Damn, look at the time. Feeling like kicking it?" The time was half an hour past 10pm and the bar had grown considerably loud with the increasing number of patrons.
"As a matter of fact, I do." She tittered at his eagerness but said nothing against it and paid for their drinks before they left.
Neither of them were drunk because of the uniqueness of their biology, something that had astounded the barman when he saw them about to leave and noticed that they were completely sober despite the dozen bottles they had drank.
"Ahh!" she moaned with pleasant content as her stretching caused some joints to pop. "That wasn't half bad."
"I agree. It was rather enjoyable, and no I'm not doing it again anytime soon." Isaac said and diligently laid down the caveat for today's outing. "Well, you're no longer moping so that's another good thing out of it."
Her face kept on looking straight ahead but she smiled at Isaac's words and hugged him lightly with one arm as they walked.
"Thanks for looking out for me, bud." She said softly as she let him go.
Isaac shrugged. "it was nothing much. Friends do it all the time."
They spoke as they went, keeping their conversation short until they arrived at Jessica's complex.
"Well, this is my spot. Wanna come in?"
Isaac shook his head. "Probably not today."
"Probably not ever, you mean." Her smirk made him laugh as it showed that she had read him completely. "Catch you later, man."
She reached the doors and turned around but Isaac was already gone, making her shake her head in amusement. "Dramatic old man." She laughed at the image that formed in her head from those words as she stepped inside her apartment.
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