White box

August

Stephanie's life was both hectic and fun over the following six weeks. She was now a multibillionaire, mostly due to selling Marcus's clocks. Her ear was now, too, much like Carl's, covered in piercings, although from her family, only Marcus could see them.

While not brand bags, Stephanie had replaced a lot of items in her wardrobe and now looked just as polished as anyone in those classy restaurants, although that polish turned out was due to manicure, pedicure, massages, procedures, good hairstyling and so on. She didn't do anything that would pop out, such as colorful nail polishes, but anything that only tweaked - HELL YEAH!

Their parents were now often out for dates, and even if they left money for ordering take-out, Stephanie and Marcus(+usually Bill) had stuff with two zeros added to the price. Marcus wasn't particularly interested in buying anything, so Stephanie asked Purple for cool clock parts, and it did deliver a whole bunch of parts from mysterious materials, about a quarter of them were invisible if Stephanie looked at them through her phone camera.

It turned out, you could ask for Purple anything, and it mostly delivered as long as you provided something of equal value. Thus Stephanie, Marcus (+also Bill) had tried eating all the most expensive foods one could find on the net from sunny sweet melons to red pine-apples to pink lettuce and even premium grade meats freshly fried who knows where on earth.

But asking Purple "how did you get this?" was useless; the mechanical voice only said [Transaction was made], but by the same token - it probably said the same to those who purchased Marcus's clocks.

Work at Carl's place went a lot like it did on her second day there, or perhaps even first, but now she too could join in and offer solutions. After getting a rune stone for high-grade aether manipulation from Purple, she started succeeding in making potions as well. The cheapest ones, that is, the more expensive the materials - the harder it was to blend them, they each had their nature, and it took time to get the knack for it.

At times Stephanie wondered just how many books had Carl read to know all the stuff he knew. Every day, he kept telling her new things about materials, their properties, and now also some bits and pieces on how to manipulate aether to get them to 'open up.'

And then, one Saturday morning, a certain young man came to Emerald's alchemy, setting something still invisible into motion.

Dark brown hair and eyes, clothes similar in style to what Carl wore, heigh and age, too, were similar, but he had the sort of untouchable beauty that might characterize a frozen flower - it felt like a single touch might make it crumble, and his clothes were torn and frosty at parts, despite it being late May, making Stephanie wonder just what had happened--

"Carl, I need a place to hi-- crash for a few days," the man said.

"Sure," Carl said to that and looked over at Stephanie. "Pretend you didn't see him,"

And then he left Stephanie to look after the store, while he led the guy somewhere deeper in the house, where Stephanie assumed Carl was living. She was sure the man had meant to say 'hide.'

Carl soon returned, and half an hour later, a young blonde woman came out with a pissed look on her face. "I think I asked to be an old man," she said.

"But I don't want to live with an old man," Carl said. "And you'll be dragging me around as your cover anyhow, might as well pretend to be my girlfriend or something."

She rolled her eyes. "If you try anything funny, I'll curse you."

From this exchange, Stephanie figured this was the same man who had come in just half an hour ago, even if he was now a blonde girl in-- Carl's clothes? Heck, she did look like Carl's girlfriend like this.