Excerpt from Chapter 3 of "I Left My Hormones in Another World: Vol 3"

“O, joyous morning to thee, Lady Jen!” Harv cried as I entered the chancellor’s living room. “How was thy night, my friend?”

Paul offered to let us stay with him at his home after the meeting with the coven. As the alternative would’ve been either a stall in Chidi’s barn or returning to the floor of the bathhouse, we’d warily accepted the offer.

I’d half expected to be shown a spare coffin to sleep in—and would’ve hopped right in it, too; I was dead on my feet—but the Nomad had instead showed me into a stately bedroom with an elegant four-poster dominating the space.

“I think it’s the first time that I’ve actually slept through the night in this world,” I replied through a yawn. “It was definitely the first time I didn’t wake up to the smell of piss. How was it out here?”

Harv patted the chaise lounge beneath him. “Like sleeping on a cloud.”

“What about you, Jaune?”

The paladin looked over at me from his own lounge with a long-suffering expression. “More like a thundercloud.”

I winced sympathetically. We’d collectively discovered on the trip to Nomad that Harv’s lack of musical talent extended to his nightly snoring as well. “We can take turns with the bed. It seems like we’ll be here a while, so… only seems fair, anyway.”

“You’re welcome to switch beds with me, fangirl,” Sadie said as she entered behind me, wrapped in a fluffy yellow towel. Her pink skin had regained some of the luster it’d lost during our stay in the bathhouse. “That tub holds its heat better than the lake in late summer.”

I snorted. “Appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll pass.”

Sadie shrugged and winked. “Your loss.”

“Dost thou really think we’ll be here that long?” Harv asked. “As nice as the chancellor was to open his house to us, I find it hard to believe there isn’t anywhere else for us to go.”

I blew out a breath. “Well, considering vampires don’t really die and they weren’t exactly expecting people to move to Nomad after they blasted off, they probably only built enough houses for the folks they had at the time.”

“Ah,” Harv pulled his beard thoughtfully. “The economics of immortality.”

“It’s a fascinating subject,” Paul said. He was suddenly standing at the other end of the room, smiling warmly at us.

Jaune was on his feet in an instant, though it was obvious he was fighting to keep his expression neutral rather than openly hostile. The guy was our host, after all.

“I’d love to explain the intricacies of our society to you all sometime,” Paul continued, unbothered.

“But more to the point, there is an open house right now, isn’t there?” Sadie’s left gill stalks rose knowingly. “The chancellor is missing.”

Paul nodded. “Unfortunately, yes, you are correct. Chancellor Valirim disappeared some weeks ago.”

“Where could he have gone?” Jaune’s question had some edge to it. “If citizens aren’t permitted to leave the city, he must still be within its borders.”

“Unless he—er, well,” I stammered.

“Unless he what?” Jaune asked.

“Unless he fell,” I finished lamely. “We’re like a million miles up, right? Could even a Nomad survive a fall like that?”

“It’s not that simple,” Paul said. “There is a fail-safe built into the city that Valirim is more than aware of. If he somehow managed to slip outside of the bounds of the city and began to fall, he could’ve activated the fail-safe at any time and returned to safety within moments. I concur with the paladin; Valirim must be here in Nomad somewhere. But considering how long it’s been, I am starting to fear the worst.”

The subtext was deafening. “You think someone killed him?”

“It’s a possibility,” Paul conceded. “But I’ve lived among all of these men for a thousand years; there isn’t a soul I could even suspect of such a crime.”

“I can think of one,” Jaune muttered darkly, massaging his stomach.

“While I will admit that Gaius is an acquired taste, he would sooner cut off his own arm than kill a fellow Nomad.” Paul’s gaze flicked over Jaune as the paladin flinched. “Ah. Forgive me my insensitive turn of phrase.”

“Is anyone looking for him?” I asked.

Paul shook his head. “Everyone in Nomad has their assigned tasks to keep the city running smoothly. There’s simply been no one we can spare to conduct an investigation.”

No one until now. “Maybe we can help, then,” I offered. “You’ve got four fresh pairs of eyes right here, and we owe you for saving our skins twice yesterday. We can investigate Valirim’s disappearance for you.”

“You’d do that?” Paul seemed genuinely surprised.

“Yeah, why not?” It seemed like an easy way to win some brownie points with the coven. Maybe if we proved ourselves trustworthy, they’d let us return to Bastion under a vow of secrecy or something—preferably with the information about red Shards that we’d come for. “We’ll get to the bottom of it, don’t worry. And bring the chancellor home safely if we can.”

Paul’s eyes shone with relief. “Ah, thank you, Jen Joyce. If you need any help with your investigation, please just let me know.”

“Will do,” I replied with a smile. “I do actually have a request, if that’s alright.”

“Just name it.”

My tummy made an ungodly sound. “Is there anything in this town we can eat?”

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Chidi said with a sigh. “This was all I had to spare.”

I inspected the bowl of greens he set down on the table warily. The assorted leaves of spinach, cabbage, and kale were wilted and carried with them the stench of decay. “I take it you haven’t invented refrigeration yet?”

“Hmm? Oh no, we did a long time ago,” Chidi replied. “But the hogs will eat anything, spoiled or not, so why waste the space? I’ll make sure to save the freshest of the next harvest for you all, though, don’t worry.”

“Pig feed,” Harv muttered, dejected. “We’ve come to a city in the sky, only to be fed pig feed.”

“Be grateful you’re being fed at all,” Jaune snapped. “Vampires on the surface would sooner eat guests than feed them.”

Chidi chuckled, his eyes lingering on Jaune. “Guests? No, didn’t you hear? You are Nomads now. Cogs in the machine. We just need to figure out where you fit, that’s all.”

“I don’t really work that way,” Sadie said. “And even if I did, from the look at your coven we got yesterday, the fangirl and I aren’t exactly typical Nomad material, are we?”

Chidi winced. “You noticed that, huh?”

“Noticed what?” Jaune asked.

“Of course you wouldn’t notice,” Sadie drawled, taking a bite out of a piece of cabbage. “You must’ve felt right at home, what with growing up in the church and all.”

Jaune’s face burned red, though he still turned to Chidi with a look of confusion.

“Nomads have—historically—only been men,” Chidi explained with a grimace. “Formerly human men, specifically.”

Oof. I hadn’t noticed that either. I was so busy watching our party’s back it hadn’t even occurred to me that Sadie and I were the only women in the whole city. It made sense, given how sexist the rest of this world was, though I couldn’t help but be disappointed that even a remote, isolated utopia like Nomad shared those same biases.

“Formerly human?” Jaune shot a suspicious look at Chidi, his hand rising to cover his throat.

“And we’re back to this,” Chidi sighed. “No, a bite from me won’t turn you into one of us. You can all rest easy.”

“How does one become a vampire, then?” Harv had his notebook and charcoal at the ready.

“I—can’t say.” Chidi met Jaune’s accusing glare apologetically. “It’s the Second Law—‘thou shalt not divulge the origin of Nomads’. Until you all undergo the ritual yourselves, I can’t breathe a word of it.”

I rolled my eyes. “So… it’s a ritual.”

“One that the coven expects us to go through to become full citizens,” Jaune added hotly.

“Or at least some of us to go through,” Sadie growled. “I’m willing to hazard a guess that Jen and I aren’t in the running.”

Harv’s hand flew across the page as he documented everything we said.

“Hmm,” Chidi groaned, defeated. “If anyone asks, I didn’t say a word.”

Despite the obvious lingering danger to Harv and Jaune, I couldn’t help but hope that Sadie’s assumption was correct, that the Nomads weren’t intending to turn me into a vampire.

It was clear that Nomads didn’t age from whenever they were turned, which likely meant their bodies didn’t change much, if at all—besides the fangs, claws, and wings, of course. Being frozen in my current state for the rest of eternity, without the chance of making further changes to my body with hormones or other procedures, was a nightmare in and of itself. Not to mention the existential dread of outliving all of my friends and loved ones. No, we needed to get out of the city before any rituals could be completed.

An idea popped into my head. “We won’t spill the tea if you don’t.”

The vampire frowned. “Hmm?”

“Chidi, our party isn’t staying here,” I admitted.

“But—”

“There is a dragon on her way here to take us home, and when she gets here, we’re going,” I continued, brokering no argument. “There is a war going on down on the surface between life as we know it and a demon lord. And take it from me, this demon lord is bad news, okay? I need to kill that demon lord, or else I won’t—” My breath caught in my throat. “—Or else the world is going to end, and I’m the person with the best shot at doing it. Allegedly.

“I know you Nomads have your rules and are worried about your secrecy,” I said. “But I need that information about creating red Shardcraft to stand a chance against Ventalus. We’re not going to do any rituals or become cogs in your machine, but we don’t pose a threat to Nomad, either. We just want the information we came for and to leave peacefully.” I took a deep breath. “Will you help us?”

Chidi swallowed, biting his lip with a fang. He glanced at Jaune, who met his gaze with a stern expression. “This… demon lord. It’s as bad as she says?”

Jaune nodded stiffly. “Ventalus is the one who took my arm. And she did it out of spite.”

“I’m so sorry,” Chidi muttered. He took a deep breath, resolve on his face. “Very well, I’ll help you. But there’s a problem.”

I smirked. “Just one?”

“When the chancellor said it was illegal to make Shardcraft weapons, he wasn’t telling the full truth,” Chidi explained. “It’s illegal to create any new Shardcraft in Nomad; only repairing or replacing existing Shardcraft is allowed.”

Harv nearly dropped his charcoal. “What? Whyever would that be?”

“You may have noticed, but we’re in the sky.” Chidi rose from the table and began to pace around the room, dreads bouncing with each harried step. “Raw Shards can only be harvested from the earth. We have a limited supply of Shards in our vaults, and if they were to run dry, Nomad would be forced to return to the surface. Any new creation is deemed frivolous by the coven to prolong the time we have in the sky as long as possible.”

“The greatest craftsmen in history are barred from creating,” Harv said. “Even I couldn’t write a darker tragedy.”

“Hang on—are you saying that Shards don’t last forever?” My hand rose to the mark on my chest nervously. “I thought they were pieces of Lenora’s body or something.”

“They are,” Jaune said at the same time Chidi shook his head.

“A Shard can theoretically last forever,” the Nomad explained. “But only if they aren’t taxed beyond what they can generate or channel. If a Shardcraft isn’t initially tuned properly, or if the system runs for so many cycles that the components degrade, it can put too much strain on a Shard and cause them to fail.”

That made sense. I’d seen two shattered Shards; one was the emerald that powered my first Shardcraft, a sword with a mind of its own, that exploded when I’d forced my OP main character powers through it to ward off a wave of demons. The second was the power Shard at the heart of the bathhouse that N’vira had managed to repair to get us to Nomad. But considering the lack of dragons in this city, I could see the logic behind banning experimentation with Shards. Up here, they were precious and rare resources.

“Okay, so just straight up asking someone to explain how to make a red Shardcraft is out,” I said. “Way too suspicious, got it.”

Chidi nodded. “After you all have eaten, I can take you to the library. Perhaps we can find some old texts about the crafting process.”

“Sounds good. But first, I’m going to blow your mind.”

“Hmm?”

I hooked a thumb at the nearest pig with a hungry smile. “The thing about these hogs? They regrow the cuts you take from them. Which means unlimited bacon for us.”

Chidi blinked. “Really? I knew that their regenerative powers applied to their blood, of course, but to their flesh as well? Remarkable.”

Sadie spit out a particularly soggy leaf she’d just forced between her teeth. “That’s been an option this whole time?”

I patted her on the shoulder. “Welcome to my world.”