Evan's Eldritch Emporium: Book 1, page 1
Evan’s Eldritch Emporium
Evan’s Eldritch Emporium
Book 1
By
Nolan Locke
Dedication
This book is for BRM, who showed me what worked and why, and that it was book worth writing. Your support has meant everything.
Wall of Fame
Kickstarter Backers!
Deity:
Huge thanks to the three gods of the EEE1 Kickstarter, who get their own page.
Katyea Grounds,
Melvin Douglas Emerson,
and
Cesar Cazares
A super special thank you from Evan and all the ladies.
Other amazing Kickstarter backers:
You kick about as much ass as Evan. Thank you so much for your support!
Emperors: The Extraordinary League of Gigachads, Aexoyir, Eric Estrada, Jonathan Kane, Thorrmak, J.A. Stines, Mike Dobey, Ardent Bliss, Brett Garr
Gold Tier: Momma M
Small Council Members: Carlos Tautimer, Vincent
Governor’s Consorts: Skyhibiscus, Shawn Campbell
Masters of Ink: Ziegfeld88, Joe Haughey III, Samuel Kraha, Kevin, Echo Copper
Drifters: Sejin’s smut-addled husband and David Riedinger
Dominators: Kail Ung, Keith Rodgers, BrainWeasels, Ricardo M., Aldaris Templar, Wheynne, T Drake, Sir Grumpy, Hutchdude, Jason Wilcox, ArchThrene, Duck
Citizens of Surrek: Mark Lobberecht, Russell Ventimeglia, Dragoon354, Brian Jones, Landfill Phil
Patreon Subscribers!
Thanks for being there, even if you couldn’t always. It was a pleasure giving you advance chapters and art and such.
Vadim J., Display name, Nunya Business, Ya Anon, first last, Kame Man, Kenneth Welever, Smudi Corp, NippVanWrinkle, Kyle Markman, EESDESESESRDT, Andinator77, Peter Kraushuber, Germane, jared ference, HoodieHydra, mickg , Dakota, Bob Saget. A disgruntled nondescript squirrel, TEG, rintaun, michael robinson, werotan, paul , Amelgar, LarryTheJoke, Cadeyrn, Ob, Arcein, StarRanger, Hagen Bishop, David Monaghan, Aceter, Edward Fisher, Goldfish2, Michael Weis, Starfall20
And thank you to www.facebook.com/groups/HaremLitBooks
They are such a tremendous group and very supportive of new authors in the genre.
Go check them out!
Table of Contents
1- Drifter
2- First Contact
3- Auralla of Sunspire
4- Brood Swarm
5- All Those Males
6- How About Jerry
7- The Domi
8- The Floating Pyramid
9- The Third Option
10- Avya
11- What It Is To Dominate
12- Breaking Boundaries
13- A Journey Rather Than A Series Of Mountains
14- Slaves of Giskennen
15- The First and Only Film
16- Prelude to the Full Moon
17- A Veritable Cornucopia
18- Marked for Death
19- A Hundred Percent Here For It
20- Starved for Banter
21- Why Is It You Don’t Kneel
22- Bed, Sell, or Slaughter
23- Settling In
24- The Matter of Shennalil
25- Phase Two
26- Operation Crack
27- Trade In Flesh
28- Hellera and Velleth
29- Spice District
30- Deal Breaker
31- A Hefty Amount of Subtext
32- I’ll Change Up My Brand
33- We Took The Party Upstairs
34- Losing the Soul
35- Taking On The Czar And Losing
36- Dungeon Masters
37- Fortune And Glory
38- Curse Your Inevitable Betrayal
39- No Hard Feelings
40- I Am Unworthy
41- You Test Me
42- Clear The Floor
43- I Hope You Don’t Forget
44- I Will Become A God
45- Magical Fleshlight
46- Changed
47- This Is My Judgement
48- What I Needed
49- You Sashay Over Here With Your Hips All…
Author’s Note
About the Author: Nolan Locke
1- Drifter
H i there, I’m Evan, and welcome to my city. Take in those tall towers, the floaty parts that slowly spin, with the artillery in them. Powered by the finest mana crystals. Walls are sturdy, reinforced with powdered mana crystals of silver and gold tier. I’m working on getting in a stock of diamond tier mana crystals, which is going to make the sort of weapons that could vaporize an enemy battalion in the blink of an eye.
Get a load of the central spire over there, with more floating crystals. Those are the shields. The blue crystals anyway. The red, yellow and orange ones are all… not shields. Heh. Excuse me if I don’t give away the entire civil defense strategy to someone I just met.
And over here, behind me, you’ll note the construction. Right, it’s nestled in the town square, not directly in the middle, but tucked away a bit. That’s where my shop used to be… I’m changing its name to the Eldritch Emporium, because Evan’s Pawn & Curiosities Shop was a mouthful. It was just too much.
Also I absolutely adore alliteration. The women here find it endearing.
“Evan!”
Oh jeez. The ladies. Excuse me a moment.
“Hiiiiii Evan!”
“Master Evan.”
“Are you going to master me later?”
“Thank you, ladies! I believe I’ll see you later.”
Love those giggles, am I right?
It wasn’t always like this… I didn’t own literally everything you can see before you. And hell, I mean I’m strong, but not the strongest person in the city. I’ve got good endurance, but I’m definitely not the hardiest person living here. Good looking, but not the most chiseled adonis around. I’m powerful, but… well, okay, I’m probably the most powerful person in the city currently. My ass goes in the throne, after all, but it’s complicated because magic and the society here are both byzantine. But once upon a time I was nothing more than your average trucker. I stuck around my home state of Michigan when I could, but did some work down into most of the midwest.
So of course, the question becomes: how the hell did I end up in charge of this city surrounded by magic, body molded to perfection by the vast mystical energies of this world?
You’d have to start at the beginning… you’d have to know how I became a Drifter.
I was working hard, like overtime hard, and for truckers that’s saying something. You roll seven days a week for three straight months and complain to me about your desk job. Near the end, before I plopped into a different world entirely and began the slow process of complete ownership, I was starting to fade out of consciousness. I’d tie my head to the air horn, so if I started to nod off, I’d get blasted back awake. I was running with the windows down in minus ten degree weather to stay conscious.
It got to the point where I was seeing things. I was literally hallucinating in blobs of color dancing before my eyes. I’d pull over, rip my pants down and dip my balls in a snowdrift in order to stay sharp.
Only that one time. The wet ass was uncomfortable, to be sure, but I will say this: it was easy to keep your eyes open sitting on that for several hours.
It was also only a week before I left earth.
I was somewhere off I-75 and headed west towards Traverse City, Gaylord I think (maybe Grayling), when I started drifting again. Not skidding my tires in a souped up race car, but drifting off to sleep. Only this wasn’t like your ordinary, average sleep; I was seeing green grasses and big puffy cloud banks rising up into a sky I’d never properly seen, not in Michigan. Michigan is almost a hundred percent trees by the side of the road.
Exhausted, hungry, and now delirious, this is what ended me up in another world.
I’d spent another short break rubbing snow into my face, scrubbing it raw so I could stay awake, and I was maybe sixty miles outside Traverse City when that hallucination sprang back into being: a line of tall trees like you’d see in Africa in the distance, miles and miles of waving grasses, great big boulders floating (floating!) near the ground, with some of them much higher up. And the sky so huge, so fundamentally massive it made me think about going to church for the first time in years. It honestly looked like heaven.
I stared at it, driving my Mack, and stared at it, and continued staring at it. I was certain it was going to disappear at any moment, and I didn’t want to lose this. I didn’t know where it had come from, or how racked my body needed to be to imagine a full-on fantasy landscape, but I wanted to memorize every detail of it.
It turned out I didn’t need to. That world invited me in.
It wasn’t a subtle invitation either. The colors of the Mack’s interior went apeshit, with gleaming rainbow like bands peeling off the chrome, drifting a weird, smoky lightshow towards me. My hands were going all multicolor also, with the steering wheel melting like Superman ice cream in my hands.
Whatever was happening was over in a burst of weird color, and I was left staring out at that wondrous landscape for real. The Mack jounced, hard, and I laid on the brake. Superman ice cream steering wheel snapped back to its usual faded black self.
I was probably dying, I thought, I’d careened off the road and plowed into a sturdy tree doing ten over the speed limit, and this was the everlasting moment you experience before bein
g snuffed out. That had to be it.
I put her in park (this felt real, between the feel of the stick shift and the grinding resistance of the gears) and stepped out. Again, the door squeaked on opening, the steps were still there, and when my foot hit the ground, it wasn’t oblivion I found, but waist high grasses waving with the light breeze.
I peered back at my haul. Mack was fully here, surrounded by grass, but had the full trailer load still hitched. She wasn’t on a road any longer.
It was a lot to take in, and I was still wrecked. My eyes felt like they were boiling out of their sockets, and I couldn’t stop tonguing the fuzz on my teeth from all the energy drinks I’d been pounding. If I really was here, I didn’t know anything about it, and therefore Mack was the safest place to be while I got some much-needed shuteye. If I was dead, well, that was all right. I wouldn’t know it anyway. This surreal moment would be a nice end. If I was really here, I wanted to be refreshed and very ready for whatever was out there… I’d gone from rural sprawl to absolute wilderness, and that meant it was good I kept a shotgun, a handgun, and my trusty baseball bat in the cab.
Plus, the cab was equipped with one of those tiny apartments in back: bunkbeds, a hot plate, a mini-refrigerator stocked with caffeine and taurine, first aid kit, pictures of my ex I hadn’t had the heart to throw away or burn. I was still in the numb with shock stage.
I ascended the stairs again, and climbed in. “Okay, facts. There’s no way to haul cargo to a place you can’t see. There’s no sense in trying to keep going forward, since there’s a big floating boulder about a hundred feet ahead of you. Even if they dock your pay, it’s better than trying to steer through a hallucination.”
I slapped my face lightly a couple of times. “You’re going to wake up on the side of the road. Maybe she’s overturned and it’ll be an ambulance, or the firefighters coming to jaws of life you out of here. Maybe we pulled over in time and we’re just on the shoulder, and all this will be a dream I’ll forget about in a few hours.” Patting the dashboard. “You don’t seem broke… yeah I probably pulled over. You’re okay, sweetpea.”
People call their vehicles all kinds of weird shit. I don’t judge.
I paused.
“And I’ll stop talking to myself like a fucking lunatic.”
Doors locked, I got in a quick brushing of the teeth, then thought it over for a bleary second. Peeing the bed wouldn’t do. I hopped out once more to take a leak, and climbed back in to head to get some shuteye. I was asleep before I could wonder any more about this weird place.
I slept like the dead, but I wasn’t.
The bathroom break convinced me it was all real. People don’t pee on a place in their dreams, and I’d wager money people don’t spend the last fleeting moments before death thinking, ‘I need to drain the lizard’.
When I woke, certain it was all real, it was still the other world outside, only dusk was falling. The temperature I hadn’t noticed before, but it was certainly cooler. Still, too hot for my parka, so I stripped it off and tossed it in the truck. I had an internal frame pack suitable for hiking and mountain climbing, but it wasn’t hiking I was thinking about doing, so I dumped out everything unnecessary to my upcoming fact finding mission, and put the baseball bat in there. I tested out the quickdraw capability, and the results weren’t great. Still, if I tilted one way, I could grab out the baseball bat and perform a wide haymaker if absolutely necessary.
Of course, if I needed to use it, especially against a wild animal, I was probably as good as dead.
A message popped up in front of my face.
So it begins…
Greetings, traveler! Now that you’ve begun to acclimate yourself to your new surroundings, it’s time to begin your journey toward understanding the world around you, and your place in it. One of the factors at play here is your abilities.
You have seven attributes, and you’ve been awarded a free star in your Tough attribute for simply making the journey here. Your first ability, Drifter, has increased your Attuned and Tough attributes as well!
You are free to allocate an additional seven stars between these, though you can’t go above three stars until leveling up.
I tapped at the words floating above me, and they disappeared. In their place, it now read Evan Westfield, Drifter. Normal tier. Under Base Attributes, it read:
Attuned— Normal*
Clever— Normal (no stars)
Charming— Normal (no stars)
Fierce— Normal (no stars)
Sly— Normal (no stars)
Quick— Normal (no stars)
Tough— Normal**
Okay, I was hallucinating myself into a video game. An RPG apparently. Turn-based combat would be way better than being ambushed.
“Shut up,” I muttered to myself, and grinned.
Seven more stars sat off to one side, waiting to be allocated. I started by putting a single star into each of the ones that didn’t have a star yet, just by dragging a star over near the attribute name, where the star snapped into one of the three depressions. It was a problem for me not to be Clever or Charming in the slightest.
That left me two more stars to place. I thought of myself as a pretty Clever person, generally, so I put another star there. Since I knew games in general always valued being fast and acting more often than your opponent, I put the last star in Quick.
It now looked like this, which was a little better:
Attuned— Normal*
Clever— Normal**
Charming— Normal*
Fierce— Normal*
Sly— Normal*
Quick— Normal**
Tough— Normal**
I made it go away by tapping the Confirm button. The bizarre game-style pop up windows didn’t bother me again, so after a moment of waiting I continued to get ready for my first excursion.
“Better add the old first aid kit,” I muttered, and stuffed it in as well. Ammo would also be an issue, and I only had a box of shotgun shells left. On the off chance this place had a reloading machine, I could probably remember what my dad had taught me back in scouts, but that info was buried under four years of being an adult. I had a cross bag specifically built to keep pickpockets from getting at your wallet while traveling abroad, and that served well enough to add extra eight shotgun shells. Again, if I needed all eight, I was definitely in serious trouble.
Regardless of the possibility of meeting my doom out here, I was feeling refreshed. Sure I was hungry, but the floating boulders and floating rocks in the distance, and that wide expanse of just insanely huge sky all perked me up. I felt pretty great.
I was as ready as I could get. Then, with an added energy drink and a packet of beef jerky, I grabbed the twelve gauge and headed out.
The idea was to get to where I could only barely see Mack, check what lay beyond in this direction, and head back. I’d head out in the four cardinal directions: where Mack was pointed, directly to the left of Mack, directly to her right, and then straight out from the loading door. Of course, it being near dark, I could only manage one of these runs now, so I decided left was the way to go.
The setting sun lay off to my right, so the truck was still pointed west, the direction I’d been going on earth. Also, not far off, one of those floating boulders waited for me to inspect it. I was getting, for the first time since being a teenager, butterflies in my stomach over it. You only saw this kind of stuff in video games and animated movies, not something you could touch with your bare hands.
It was at least a mile off, and only grew in size as I approached. I had figured it was the size of a suburban two floor house, but it was at least three of those side by side by side.
“Holy shitballs,” I muttered to myself, craning my neck to get a look at it.
It was floating only about four feet off the ground, meaning I could lay a hand on it. I did so, and got a thrumming feeling out of it, like someone was playing a song with real heavy bass through a surround sound system, maybe on top where I couldn’t see.
