A Fae's Emporium 1 (Patreon)

Commissioned by InfiniteChaosRei

Tags: multiverse, commissioned, RWBY, nasuverse, etc

A Fae’s Emporium

Chapter 1

-VB-

Ears flickered. 

Eyes twinkled. 

Ego… was big. 

“Why do you look cuter than me?!” Ruby Rose whined as she pouted at the so-called shopkeeper who sat behind the gnarly and ancient wooden counter at the back of the shop. 

“Whatever could you mean?” the cat faunus shopkeeper grinned coyly.

His cat ears flickered and immediately took her attention.

“You’re a boy!!!” 

“And~?”

“You’re cuter than me and I’m a girl!” 

“Sorry you’re so ugly.”

Ruby staggered backward as she clutched her chest. 

“You’re so mean!” she whined with a pout. 

He shrugged. “I can’t help that I am perfect,” he huffed. “So. What are you looking for?” he asked her. 

“Maybe I just came to window shop.”

“It’s a funny way to window shop if you enter the store.”

She pouted and looked away, making her cloak flutter.

But after she turned her head away from him, she noticed something … interesting. 

“... That’s a nice gun,” she mumbled as she stared. “... It’s a big gun.”

The shopkeeper saw her looking, and she noticed him looking at her and then at the gun.

“You know… I’m not against parting with that gun if you can pay for it.”

“R-Really?” she asked hopefully, but then quickly snapped out of her reverie. “Wait, wait, wait. I should be … I should be looking over it first! I can’t buy it without knowing what it is!”

“That’s a good catch,” he hummed. “Dumb customers might make me more money, but I want the favors of repeat customers, you know?” And then he smiled. 

Ruby felt uneasy about that smile. 

“W-What kind of favors?” she asked him. 

“Hmm… I’ll let you first look over the gun,” he said as he gestured to a corner of the shop. It was a table with all of the tools needed to disassemble, reassemble, clean, and modify a gun. It also happened to sit right next to a doorway leading into a cafeteria. “But if you break it, then you’ll pay for it, okay?”

“Okay!” she said as she picked up the giant gun that made her look tiny in comparison and quickly flashed over the station, leaving behind trails of rose petals that quickly dissipated into nothing. 

The shopkeeper chuckled, but Ruby didn’t care. All she wanted to know was how this gun worked.

She wondered what those words meant, though.

Vulkan Pattern Meltagun.

The first thing she did was set the gun down on the table and look it over. First off, it was huge! It looked like someone upsized a pistol to handgun size but kept the same dimensions. If it wasn’t for her aura boosting her strength, then she definitely wouldn’t have been able to lift it, too! It felt heavier than any of the tools that Dad and Yang used to fix Dad’s car. 

“Oof, let’s open you up!” 

She didn’t hear the tingling of the shop door opening from the other side of the shop’s front. 

-VB-

Shirou looked around. 

The red haired teenager felt mana leaking from this store so he decided to visit it out of curiosity on his way to school. 

There were a lot of babbles, tools, and other interesting objects towards the back of the shop, which was where the source of the mana was, and the front of the shop displayed normal things like pencils, erasers, and notebooks for students, towels, nets, and small bottles of household chemicals for housewives, and household tools, mechanic-related items, and even a few electronic parts for the average man. 

Then he paused. 

He smelled something really nice. 

Shirou walked deeper into the store and passed by a black haired girl with a cloak tinkering with … something that was probably a toy gun. Real guns weren’t comically large like that. 

He didn’t even bother to structurally analyze the gun before walking through the doorway next to the girl’s tinkering station.

Here, he found himself standing in a cafeteria. 

“Welcome, welcome!” 

Shirou blinked and looked towards -.

Hmm. It was a teenager like himself wearing an apron and a pair of cosplay cat ears. 

“Hello. I smelled something really good.” 

His pride as a cook demanded that he knew what the origin of the smell was. It was rich and deep. 

“Oh? That? Regular customers can’t smell that, you know,” the cashier (cook?) grinned. “Only people with mana can.”

Shirou’s mind stuttered. 

“Of course, this means that, if you want a taste, then you’ll have to pay with something other than cash. We don’t accept human currencies around here.”

Shirou opened his mouth to speak. “... Youkai?”

That made the cashier mad. “How rude!” he nearly shrieked. “Do I look like a mere mountain spirit or a river monster with features so distorted that I can’t even shrink the size of my ball sack?!” 

He grimaced. “I’m … regretful (gomen) about my comment,” Shirou said and bowed. “I’d like to have a taste of your … mana infused food.”

The cashier sniffed. “Fine! But how are you going to pay?” 

Shirou paused. Right, the man(?) did say that he didn’t accept human currencies. “What do you accept?” he asked. 

The cashier looked him over before pointing at his right hand. “That crest.”

He blinked and looked down. Right. It appeared on the back of his hand this morning. 

“This crest…?” he asked. “How will you remove it without harming me?”

“I know a way. That can pay for the food.”

Shirou looked down at it before nodding. “Alright. I’ll use this to pay for the food.”

“Wonderful~!” the cashier grinned, and Shirou felt like he just got scammed. But the crest peeled off of his skin without him so much as feeling it and floated over to the cashier.

Who had a glass jar of dirt out.

He popped the lid open and slammed it back down when the wispy, floating crest entered it. 

“Great! I’ll get started on your food. You’ll love Garlic Bird Oyakodon,” the cook(!) grinned. 

And Shirou did. 

It was the best thing he ever tasted. 

-VB-

It happened after the other customer left. 

Ruby stared down at the gun.

It was rough. It was tough. 

But it was also a mature design. It was made to be tough as heck and survive just about anything. 

She could see that because it had the same simplicity and better toughness of the standard rifles given to regular soldiers and police officers. 

Ruby expected every single part of it to be durable!

But there was a component inside a coil-thingy that wasn’t.

And it broke. 

“Well~.” She froze and slowly looked up.

The shopkeeper was looking down at the broken component and then at her. “You seem to be in a bit of a pickle,” he drawled with half-lidded eyes but with thinned out lips.

“I … uh… I can pay!” 

“That’s good, cute lady. Do you have eighteen souls?”

She paused. “Buh wha?”

“Eighteen souls. It’s about what I paid to get that.”

“... huh?”

He raised his eyebrow. “Cute miss, have you seen around my shop? It’s not exactly normal stuff.”

As if to point that out, he reached out with his third arm and pulled out a bird cage with a … talking tiny person in it. 

“Help! This crazy guy made me swallow a potion and it made me tiny!” 

Ruby stared at the tiny person and then back up at the no longer third arm’ed shopkeeper. 

He smiled. 

It didn’t look like a nice smile. 

“I… uh… I don’t have souls?”

He hummed. “How about a contract of eternal servitude?” 

“W-Wha-? No! A gun can’t be worth that much!” 

“Then how about that twinkle in your eyes?”

“... Twinkle in my what?”

“The twinkle in your eyes. I like the way they shine. Not your eyes. Just the thing behind them. How about it?”

She opened her mouth, felt very confused, and closed her mouth again. 

Twinkle in her eyes but not her eyes? What was he trying to get at? 

But if the tiny person was anything to go by, she wasn’t talking to a normal person at all.

She gulped. “I-Is it going to hurt?”

“Oh no. Not at all! That would be adding harm to the cost, and that would be against my policy!” 

His smile said otherwise. 

He waved his hand and she briefly got blinded as something bright flashed her. She squinted her eyes close before the light drifted away. When she opened them again, the shopkeeper had a floating ball of sparkling light above his palm.

“See? No pain. Oh, and of course, you paid for the gun.”

She looked back down and saw that it had been put together. 

“I fixed it again as part of the sale. It’ll work, but next time, do be careful with the merchandise, cute miss, yes? Thank you for your purchase, darling~!”

Ruby Rose left the shop very confused.

It wasn’t until she was cleaning herself to go to sleep that she saw that her silver eyes had dulled a little.

-VB-

Connected Worlds so far:
RWBY
Fate/Stay Night