"We still don't even know what it is. But, since we can't see its grade, I'm assuming it must be something very powerful."
Leo struggled to find his next words. "I'm... I'm afraid, Alex. I didn't want to do this, but I think I should take the book to my family."
It all made sense now. Whenever the conversation turned to Leo's father, he would suddenly become the polar opposite of the extremely confident and charming person that he always was otherwise. It wasn't the fact that he'd was kidnapped and beaten that worried him, it was the fact that he'd gotten himself into shit deep enough that he'd need to tell his father.
"Of course," I said, trying to calm him. "Do you think they'll be able to identify it?"
"I can't say for sure. But the clan has considerable resources. The only way to find out what it is without anyone else finding out we have it is if we give it to them."
"That sounds good," Louie agreed. "Let's do it, as soon as we're done with the quest."
"Yeah..." Leo agreed, seeming a bit hesitant about postponing this. "Can I see it, Alex?"
"The book? Sure. Do you think we missed something?"
"I doubt it, but you can't be too safe, right?"
"Right," I agreed and mentally accessed my inventory to find it. But I was interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Who is it?" Leo asked, startled.
"Probably Rory," I said as I stood up to let him in. "He was parking his car and is going to join us for a drink."
"Oh, great," Leo replied, sounding a bit disappointed.
"Don't worry," I reassured him. "I'll steer the conversation away from what happened today. Here's the book."
I placed the red leather-bound tome on the table and got up to open the door. Leo grabbed the book immediately and started examining it, while Louie had already opened his personal DEM tablet, probably browsing through the marketplace for what he'd buy from the money he'd won on the bet earlier. Rory knocked on the door again just before I was able to open it.
"Ye always take yer fucking time, don't ye?" he said and walked past me.
"Only because my place is bigger than a cardboard box," I said, and closed the door behind him. The dwarf went straight for my whiskey stash and turned around to look at me.
"Sure, help yourself." I pointed at the bottle cabinet with my hand.
"Bless ye, half-Celt. Ye're as hospitable as the Greek gods."
I headed back to the living area. "Found anything, Leo?" I retrieved the other big piece of loot we'd gained during our raid at Abrathion's warehouse: the orb that contained the soul of the dragon Ommanth the Beneful. We'd come to an agreement that I'd take him out and talk with him for at least a few minutes every day, and now seemed as good a moment as ever.
"Well, isn't this a happy atmosphere?" the dragon's honeyed voice echoed in the room as soon as the orb emerged from my inventory. "Even the dwarf looks like he's enjoying himself."
"Ye would be in a good mood if ye were having this fine a whiskey too, lizard," Rory said, in the same insulting tone he always used toward the dragon.
"Good dwarf, I have consumed more whiskey in my life than you'll ever drink water."
"Jokes on ye!" the dwarf bellowed. "I drink far more whiskey than water."
"That is seriously not good for your health, Rory," Louie said, momentarily looking up from his DEM window-shopping.
"Yeah, what the fuck, Rory?" I agreed.
"Bah." He waved his hand at us dismissively. "Ye summerborns are too worried about silly things. We got yer friend back, didn't we? That's reason enough to celebrate."
"Was our elf-man taken?" the dragon asked.
Louie, now too distracted to continue his search, moved closer to the orb and started to explain. "Abrathion, the previous owner of your orb..."
"So when are ye gonna talk about this pest to yer family?" Rory asked Leo, completely disregarding Louie's conversation with Ommanth.
Leo didn't seem too eager to reply to him, so--as I had promised--I offered to change the subject.
"Let's not worry about that right now," I interjected. "You said you wanted to craft a few things, Rory? How's the business going?"
"What do ye mean how it's going, lad?" he asked and took another big sip, straight from the bottle. "We always talk numbers on Sundays. Ye know our arrows are selling like water to fish."
"I mean how's your funding going? At the rate we're growing right now, I'll have reached my initial goal by the end of the year, but I don't see any reason why I'd stop there. So I could focus my efforts on funding your war."
"That's still very far from happening, son," Rory replied, "but I appreciate the offer. Let's say that I'm still quite a way from gathering fifteen billion dollars."
"Fifteen what?" I exclaimed.
"Is that a lot?" Louie asked, still not having bothered to learn the value of money. "That sounds like a lot."
"It's a fucking lot, Louie. Probably enough to feed all the dogs in the world bacon for the rest of their lives."
"Holy macaroni!" Louie sprung up and started spinning himself around. "That's so much bacon. Like, where do you even store all this bacon? Killing dragons is an expensive business, Rory!"
As soon as the words escaped his lips, Louie's ears drooped. Rory's past, and the destruction of his kingdom at the hands of a dragon, was something that we didn't talk about openly. Of course Leo knew about it by now, but Rory definitely wasn't keen on sharing this information with Ommanth, no matter how many times we'd told him it might prove helpful. And the dwarf was clearly not happy about Louie letting it slip now.
"It's none of yer fucking business, dragon," Rory said before Ommanth was able to say anything.
"I did not utter a single word--" The dragon's voice echoed from the orb.
"Ye were thinking about it," Rory
