The walk to the edge of the neighborhood felt longer than usual. The charcoal wool of my suit jacket caught the fading sunlight, a dark contrast to the peeling paint and overgrown lawns of the block. I wasn't here to loiter. I was here to settle a moral ledger.
I reached the gate of the house where Granny and Rishie lived. It was a modest place, kept alive by sheer willpower and a lot of gardening. Rishie was there, as expected, perched on the top step of the porch. A thick textbook was propped against her knees, and the yellow glow of the porch light made her look like a quiet island in the middle of a restless sea.
[ HOST PROXIMITY: TARGET RISHIE ]
[ EMOTIONAL FREQUENCY: SKEPTICAL / UNSETTLED ]
[ STATUS: ACQUAINTANCE ]
I stopped at the foot of the stairs. She didn't look up immediately, but I saw her grip tighten on the edge of her book.
"Granny's inside," she said, her voice cutting through the evening air like a chill. "If you're here to show off the new feathers, you're wasting your time. She's seen enough 'ambitious' young men to know that a suit doesn't change the heart."
"I'm here to thank her for the hospital visits, Rishie," I said. "And to thank you for the ride. I didn't have a chance to say it properly."
Rishie finally looked up. Her eyes raked over the tailored lines of my clothes, pausing at the expensive leather of my shoes. There was no admiration there, only a deep-seated wariness.
"You look like a stranger, Lucas," she said, her voice softening but losing none of its edge. "One day you're a delinquent with a wrench, and the next you're walking around like you own the zip code. It's... unsettling. It feels like you're playing a game, and I don't like the stakes."
"Maybe I just stopped letting people tell me what my stakes are," I replied.
"People don't just change their entire nature over a weekend," she countered, standing up. "My mother used to talk like that right before she lost everything. If you've gotten yourself into something dark to pay for that suit, stay away from this porch. We don't need that kind of 'gratitude'."
She turned and went inside, the screen door snapping shut with a finality that echoed in the quiet street.
The next morning, the high school was a hive of buzzing rumors, but I bypassed the drama for the sanctuary of the library. I needed the school's high-speed uplink to monitor the London market openings before my first class.
Rishie was already in a corner carrel, her workspace a chaotic spread of charts and handwritten notes. She was working on her honors thesis, but even from a distance, I could see the frustration in the hunch of her shoulders.
I walked toward the back, my boots silent on the carpet. As I passed her table, my eyes scanned her work. The Intellect-driven overlay in my vision didn't just see numbers; it saw the narrative of the data.
She was struggling with a complex macroeconomic model, her pen hovering over a calculation that was fundamentally flawed.
"You're using the wrong coefficient for the inflation expectations," I said quietly, not stopping.
Rishie stiffened. She looked up, a sharp retort ready on her tongue, but I was already a few feet past her. "What did you say?"
I paused and turned back, keeping my expression neutral. "The Phillips Curve application on page three. You're treating the supply-side shock as a temporary fluctuation instead of a structural shift. If you don't adjust the base year to 1972, your entire conclusion on stagflation is going to be statistically invalid."
Rishie stared at me. The silence in the library felt heavy. She looked down at her calculator, her fingers flying over the keys as she re-ran the numbers. I watched the realization dawn on her face—the sudden, sharp clarity that I was right.
"How?" she whispered, her voice barely audible. "You didn't even take the advanced placement exams. You spend half of Economics drawing in your notebook."
"I was occupied with other things back then," I said, turning back toward my terminal. "I'm not occupied anymore."
I sat down and opened my laptop. The London markets were volatile, a sea of flickering candles that I now understood with the same clarity as the errors in Rishie's paper. I wasn't just a student; I was a predator monitoring a digital ecosystem.
[ SYSTEM FEEDBACK: INTELLECTUAL DOMINANCE CONFIRMED ]
[ REPUTATION UPDATE: TARGET RISHIE IS RE-EVALUATING SUBJECTIVE LOGIC ]
[ LUST ESSENCE HARVESTED: +15 LP ]
I could feel her watching me from across the room. It wasn't the look of a girl in love; it was the look of a scientist who had just discovered a new, dangerous element in a familiar lab. I was an anomaly to her, a mystery that didn't fit into the "Lucas Chaycer" file she had kept for a while now.
The behemoth didn't need her to like him yet. He just needed her to acknowledge that the old world was gone.