“Probably shouldn’t have kicked the thing in half then, eh?”
Riley’s attention snaps over to me. “You broke it in half?”
“I stubbed my toe on it,” I say. “It hurt and annoyed me, so I kicked it.”
“Well, it’s hurting my heart that this could have been worth more money!”
“I can go find more. It’s not even a struggle to find. It’s harder to find a single minute with you to ravish your body.”
“You’re ridiculous. Now let’s see how much it’s even worth first,” Riley says. “He could lowball us and we’d have no idea. We probably should have talked to a few people, but we don’t really have a choice. We’ll just deal with him lowballing us and do a bit more research for next time.”
“Sure, sure,” I say as the man returns.
“We would like to make you an offer,” he tells me.
“Okay.”
The man clasps his hands in front of himself. “My client would like to offer two point eight million.”
I look over at Riley and see that his face is quite unreadable. That must mean the man is doing the lowball thing Riley was talking about.
“I already have someone interested at three million,” I say. “And if you can’t do a good chunk over that?—”
He briefly stares at the gemstone before going, “We can do three point two million. That is our final offer.”
I glance at Riley who is nodding wildly, so I shrug. “Yeah, sure.”
“If you have more like this, I would be happy to do business again,” he says.
“Thanks. I’ve just used it as a paperweight for the last six hundred years, but I do have another one somewhere. I’ll find it and contact you. I think I was using it as a doorstop for a bit…”
The man looks quite startled and I’m not sure why, unless he’s realized that it really is the perfect job for the gemstone. Maybe he never thought of such a thing and is pleased to have such a splendid idea.
“I have these things too,” I say as I dump out the rest of the gemstones in front of the man who looks delighted. Riley haggles with him a bit, but they all seem quite useless compared to the first one, leaving us with four million dollars in total.
“H-How would you like to proceed?” the jeweler asks. “Will the funds go to an individual or?—”
“To Torin, God of War and Love,” I say.
Riley pushes me out of the way and deals with the logistics, and since it’s all rather boring, I wander off and find this squeaky whiteboard on the wall. I grab a marker and draw Quill on it… and then a penis, smiling when I see both. Riley looks less thrilled by them and waves at me, which I assume means he wants me to wave back. His exasperation tells me I’m wrong, but after I’ve made a tower of penises, he finally finishes up andtries his hardest to direct the jeweler out the door without him looking at the whiteboard.
The man turns to find me, hesitates when he sees my wonderful art, then slowly shakes my hand before hurrying out the door.
“So… I was thinking that maybe we could buy some chickens and cattle and get some farming going, but I don’t know how many chickens we can buy with this. If we at least get a couple of hens and a rooster, we’d have enough before too long.”
Riley looks stunned before raising an eyebrow. “I’m sorry, you want to know if fourmilliondollars is enough to get a couple of chickens?”
“I knew I should have asked for more. Your expression told me to ask for more.”
“Did it?Torin, do you know how much four million dollars is?”
“Not a clue,” I admit.
“Okay, so a baby chick is about… I don’t know… three dollars. Or make it a more expensive one, let’s go fancy and say it’s five dollars. At five dollars…” He smacks his phone around for a minute before looking up at me. “At five dollars, you could buy eight hundredthousandchicks with that much money.”
“Huh… no wonder he looked at me strangely when I told him I was using that first one as a paperweight.”
“You are ridiculous.”
