Reroll

Now, it's been painted, and the paint is peeling… but it's a brick building, so the peeling paint barely matters.  The windows are boarded up… but really, we don't need a GOOD house, we need a valid address for mail and packages so we can get ID and other things, close enough to the college to access resources there, like the computer labs, so that we can have the things we need sent to us.

Even at that, it's a temporary need: Once we have proper legends in the system and a bit of money to spend, we should be able to get more without much of a hassle. I mean, we have MAGIC. How hard can it be to make some money?

We do a walk around the building… ah, that's why nobody's bought it: A chunk of the roof caved in.  I mean, that's fixable, and buildings in this area are valuable land, so why…?

“Oh, that's amazing… but nobody's going to fix that roof until they're gone.” Ed apparently sees something I don't. Which is expected….

“What do you see?” Betty asks him.

“Well, see there, right at the peak where it collapsed, that bundle of sticks?” Ed points.

I look where Ed's pointing. “Yeah, I see the bundle, but…”

My thoughts are stopped cold by a bald eagle landing there, carrying prey, which it starts ripping into bloody chunks and feeding it to what I presume are young eagles just out of my line of sight.

“That is awesome,” is all I can say.

“Indeed,” Ed explains, “but it's also why nobody's fixed this place up.”

“Right… they're an endangered species,” I start.

“Actually no,” Ed replies, “They’ve recovered to the point where they're no longer covered by the Endangered Species Act at all. There's a separate law that covers them to the same basic effect, though: Nobody's allowed to do anything that might cause them problems.  Odd though… not a spot they'd normally choose….”

“Regardless: Go eagles,” I say, “It's not like we need the entire house.  Let's see what we have to work with, eh?”

Ed unlocks the front door in just six seconds: The Disable Device skill rocks.

The interior is… not TOO bad.  There's no furniture, but the front of the house is largely fine on the inside.  Dust all over, a little mold, it all seems to be things that can be solved with some rags and elbow grease.  And the front half is actually pretty nice under the dust: Twin wooden curving staircases in the great hall going upstairs, and this place is at least three stories tall.  I'll need to take a closer look at the carvings once we've cleaned it up… can't really make them out for now due to the cobwebs.

We do a full tour of the building… it's old, so there's not much in the way of power outlets (not that the power is on), and less of data (none at all), but it has a few dozen rooms, and only about six of them are unusable due to damage: It has far more usable space than we need right now, really.  

“There's no power…” Ed starts in.

“What do you expect?” Betty laughs, “It's an abandoned house.”

I chuckle, “And it's not like we have any electronics to power right now.”

“We will, though…” I muse, “Maybe charge things at the college?”

“That'll work for now… eventually we'll need more,” Ed pauses, “Heat may be an issue.  Yeah there's fireplaces, but no wood for them….”

Not for me; as an undead, normal cold doesn't bother me. But for everyone else… “Our big furry friends will cuddle,” I counter, “and we can switch our gear to winter clothing as needed.  Feeding the pets, though….”

“I've got that,” Ed answers, “Dream Feast is on the Druid list… although getting a good five targets is going to eat up ALL of my first level slots every day.” Yes, Ed knows not to count me as needing food.

“Heh,” Betty chuckles, “Literally.”

I chuckle as well, “Yes. Well, we're covered, then. So… let's get started….”

We need to make the place look…respectable enough for fraternity row… and so we get to work. Which is mostly just mowing the lawn with an old manual push mower we found in the garage. Not a gas mower, an old, rusty manual push mower, where pushing it forward turns the gears that spin the blades that cut the grass.  I worked with one before, once, back before I went to college. They're EXHAUSTING. And if anything, I’m weaker now… but undead are immune to fatigue. I am not feeling it as I go over the lawn, over and over again, until all the grass is down to a normal level.

I am bored, though.

Still: There's worse ways to spend an evening than pushing a mower. Betty and Ed are inside taking care of the dirt and grime; I don't exactly envy them however many years of neglect they're fixing.  So I mow.  And mow.  And mow again: This type of mower is NOT as good as a gas mower: It's far more likely to miss taller blades of grass than is the powered counterpart, and there's a lot of tall grass here. I go over the yard more than a dozen times before it's all done, collecting the cut grass and dumping it into a big pile in the back.  And when I'm finally done as the sun is rising, it no longer looks like the seedieist house on fraternity row.

Just the second seediest, but it's an improvement, and a fresh coat of paint is going to be in our budget soon enough. Then we'll be maybe the third or fourth worst building… at least from the front.

I head inside to check up on how my fellow immortals are doing: The great hall, at least, is clean; I can see the bas reliefs now… they're painted in full color.  Life size images of anatomically improbable men sticking their rods into more anatomically improbable women. The detail is amazing, I can count the hairs in both of their bushes, and I almost expect that black guy with the giant meat rod to call out to that lucky Japanese girl with milk dripping from her knockers that he's about to pop.  And… I'm heating up just….

I close my eyes and picture taking out a smelly, stinking can of spoiled fish to the curbside garbage can, in vivid color and try to remember the smell of my nephew's diapers when I watched him a year prior.

When the heat in my middle finally cools a bit, I look down at the marble tiled floor, and open my eyes.  Okay, so… if I heated up that badly just looking at one of the carvings, and Betty and Ed were actually handling them to wipe them down, I should expect to find them together on the floor somewhere.

Also, we'll need to add curtains or something to cover the walls to our budget… once we have money to spend, anyway… because this is a considerable complication.

Once I've cooled down “enough” I risk raising my eyes… okay, as long as I don't focus on the decor, it's not too bad… and start looking for what I expect to find. Looks like they got the great room… the kitchen… oh, an actual wood burning stove and an ice box (not a refrigerator, not a freezer, a giant insulated cabinet with a drip tray draining to a pipe because when you put ice in to keep things cold, the ice melts and that water has to go somewhere… this place has clearly been around for quite some time, that thing has to be like a hundred years old).  Bathroom… ah, there they are, in an old brass tub (or maybe it's bronze?  I'm not great with metallurgy).

They're both dead to the world, snoozing, their animals squeezed in on either side of the tub, their gear strewn about the room haphazardly, both of them nude, Betty’s legs and tail still wrapped around Ed… I'm pretty sure he never actually pulled out… I'm not sure he had the option, with how Betty’s wrapped her legs and tail around him, his rod buried to the hilt in her; I can just picture him thrusting into her, dumping his warm seed into her quivering… and I'm warming up again… I turn aside and close the door. With the beasts there, they're safe enough.

And I should rest for eight hours to refresh my power points anyway… one downside of being an undead Psion is that the low-level no-equipment recharge trick isn't available, as the Body Fuel feat requires being alive while the Shape Soulmeld feat to get the Strongheart Vest requires a constitution score of thirteen… I fail both. But if I were alive, Ability Burn is a type of ability damage, so I could refresh power points at a rate of two per round forever; basically recharge casting. Hmm… come to think of it, “alive” in the game is defined by having a positive constitution score and hit points.  A dip in Synthesist Summoner could get me there, and I'd be immune to the ability burn as an undead so I could skip Shape Soulmeld for the Strongheart Vest… eh, next Psion.

For now, I just need to sit down and have eight hours of restful calm… I listen to the birds outside.