Death's New Adventure

Chapter 12: Dressing Nice is Expensive

Since I had given the others the rest of the day off, I decided to take a break myself and take a walk around Guildsburg. I stepped out of the guild house, and once again marvelled that the skimpy Succubus Wear I always wore kept me so warm in the winter season. It seemed like magic, but I had been assured by Melissa several times that that's just how clothes worked.

"Warm clothes keep you warm, and cool clothes keep you cool. That's just how clothes are made," she had said.

"But shouldn't warm clothes cover more of you? How do they keep you warm if they don't cover you?" I had asked.

"Why would that matter? If they're warm, they're warm. It doesn't have to cover you up to do its job," she had answered.

I pondered that once again as I walked along the snow covered road in what amounted to little more than a particularly skimpy swimsuit. In my own world I would be freezing, but in this one the clothes did do their job despite leaving little to the imagination and covering not much more than the essentials.

I thought back to Andrea's comment earlier about my clothing as I walked toward the market. Certainly, it hadn't been my choice to wear them initially; Rachel had initially given them to me to wear when I was still expected to be enslaved, and I had little choice but to wear what I was given. Now, though, I had the freedom to wear what I wanted, but I still wore the Succubus outfit that was for slaves. The only other outfit I owned was the farmer's outfit, but I couldn't bring myself to wear it. Besides bringing back painful memories, it was a cool outfit for the summer. 'Maybe I should update my wardrobe', I thought.

It wasn't that I was particularly embarrassed to be wearing the succubus outfit; I didn't seem to have an ounce of modesty left. If I were being honest with myself, it wouldn't really bother me anymore to walk around completely naked. However, I was very aware that doing so would just be inviting trouble. Even the succubus outfit was technically inviting trouble, as my encounter with Richard so long ago proved. Likely the only reason such encounters hadn't become frequent was Master Michaels' say on the matter. Andrea's earlier comment only further demonstrated that I needed to make more of an effort to dress well to fit in.

With these thoughts in mind, I entered the first shop I saw that seemed to be selling clothes. I took a few moments to bask in the warmth of the shop after coming in from the cold, before looking around at the displays. Before I had even had a chance to take in the clothing on display, the proprietress noticed me.

"Jessica! What in the world are you wearing?!" the woman asked from across the room, and started walking toward me. The woman had an apron with a large pocket over her common blouse and long skirt, and a pincushion sewn into the apron which had needles of various sizes poking through it. Her brown hair ran down her back in a long braid, and her piercing green eyes took in my appearance as she approached. In particular, my wings and tail. "Oh! You're not Jessica..." she said apologetically. "But I don't do business with slaves, you'll need to have your master-"

"I'm not a slave," I said flatly, cutting her off and pulling my guild card out of my inventory. I charged it with a tiny bit of my mana before handing it to her to activate its 'security feature', a section of the card that glowed when charged with its owner's mana... and only its owner's mana. It only cost a point of mana to activate, so practically anyone could do it, but only lasted a few seconds. "I'm an adventurer with the guild."

The woman looked over the card and the rapidly dimming glow of its security area, and then looked at me quizzically. The guild card showed my name, race, and rank in the guild, and was accepted everywhere in Guildsberg as a form of identification for those that owned one. She tried to charge the security area herself with a point of mana, and received a static shock from the card for her trouble; only the owner could activate the security glow.