Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 961: Monsters in a Furniture Shop

The showroom was called Meridian Contract Interiors. Its floor manager was a silver-templed professional named Marcus who had sold office landscapes to banks, law firms, and two governors, and he greeted the afternoon’s clientele with his very best handshake before the identity of the clientele finished loading in his brain.

”Welcome in, welcome, we, ah.” Marcus’s smile held. Marcus’s eyes went from Kaiden to the horns to the ears and back to Kaiden at a speed that undid his composure in three seconds. ”You would be. Eclipse.”

”We’re here to buy furnishing for a guild hall. About three floors worth,” Kaiden said. ”We read that you pride yourselves on durability and allow live testing. My ladies would like to see for themselves. Is that okay?”

”Testing,” Marcus repeated.

”Touching everything,” Calypso clarified, and was already in the aisles before Marcus found his next word.

”Well... Be my guests?” he muttered weakly. ”Just don’t use awakened strength, these are civilian-”

”Naturally,” Bastet interjected, and they were off.

What followed rearranged several of Marcus’s beliefs about his own showroom.

Calypso tested chairs the way the chairs had never been tested and would never be tested again, dropping her full weight into each one, rolling it, spinning it, rocking it on its back legs to hear what the joints confessed.

The first executive chair took it. So did the second. The third, a competitor’s model Marcus had always privately considered overpriced, made a sound like a small tree losing an argument and folded sideways. Calypso rode it all the way to the floor with her tail out for balance and came up grinning.

”Weak,” she announced, to the showroom at large, holding the corpse of the chair up in one hand. ”This one lies. It looks strong and it lies. Darling, we are not buying the liar.”

”We’re also paying for the liar,” Kaiden said. ”You shouldn’t have gone that hard-”

”Yes, obviously we are paying for the liar. I killed it, it’s mine.” She set it down with respect, patted its armrest once in farewell, and moved on to the standing desks.

”No, no... I can’t have you pay. The lady... she didn’t use awakened strength. Just her...” Marcus gulped. ”Weight.”

”You’re a brave man,” Calypso chuckled.

Marcus opened his mouth, arrived nowhere, and closed it.

He recovered on the leather sofas, because leather was where Marcus lived.

He had a full presentation for this aisle, hand gestures included, and he was two sentences into the words full-grain Italian hide when Bastet, who had been trailing one hand along stitching and seams the whole time in silence, stopped him with a raised finger.

She bent, pressed her palm flat to the seat cushion, and held it there. Her ears made one slow rotation. She pinched a seam between two fingers and rolled it, drew a fingertip along the grain against its lie, and then looked up at Marcus.

”Corrected,” she said. ”The frame is honest and the leather is good. But this hide was drum-dyed and finished with a polymer seal, which means in three summers it will feel like a car seat. That one.”

The finger moved to the sofa nobody ever bought, the expensive one at the back. ”Aniline. Undisguised. It will scar and darken and improve for thirty years. You have been leading with the wrong sofa, and I suspect you know it.”

Marcus looked at the sofa at the back. Marcus looked at the tanned queen in bronze silk who had just delivered his own private opinion, the one he had lost the argument about at a regional meeting in 2019.

”Ma’am,” he said, with feeling, ”would you like a job?”

”No,” said Bastet, moving on. ”I have a Master. But you may bring me the lounge section.”

The lounge section was where the event achieved its final form.

Because Bastet did not evaluate lounge furniture by sitting on it. Sitting was for chairs, and chairs were for working.

Lounge furniture existed for one purpose, and she tested for that purpose with scientific rigor: she installed Kaiden on each candidate sofa, arranged herself along the rest of it, and laid her head in his lap.

”Master... Please begin,” she asked.

He was, by the third sofa, thoroughly practiced at his role, which was to rest one hand on her hair and stroke while she settled her weight, closed her eyes, and consulted whatever royal instrument measured these things.

Her tail hung off the cushions and swayed. The gold on her ankles crossed and chimed. And when a piece passed inspection, the verdict was delivered as a purr, low and rolling and unmistakable, resonating up out of her chest into the showroom’s respectful hush.

’Yeah,’ Kaiden decided, somewhere around the fourth sofa, with a queen purring across his lap and half a mall filming it. ’We’re doing this in person from now on.’

The showroom had acquired an audience by then. It pressed against the aisle openings, phones up, and it had opinions.

”He’s petting her,” a man in a golf shirt whispered, in genuine pain. ”That’s a real life catwoman and she’s getting scritches.”

”I wish they’d do fan meets...” another man said, hollow.

”I have a girlfriend,” a third man announced to no one, as if reminding himself of a fact from a previous life.

Bastet heard all of it yet made no acknowledgment of any of it, except that her purr rolled louder, her hand found Kaiden’s knee, and she smiled without opening her eyes, slow and satisfied, counting her tribute.

The procurement happened from the lap. That was the part Marcus would tell colleagues about for years.

The order that refurnished three floors of the most dangerous address in America was dictated by a felinid queen lying across her guild leader’s legs with her eyes closed, item by item, in complete confidence, while he played with her hair.

”The aniline sofas, both, for the third-floor office. The walnut conference table your associate showed us, but the ten-seat, the twelve is vanity. Task chairs, the second model my sister of carnage tested. Not the liar. Reception in the cream bouclé, four pieces.”

The tail swayed. The purr rolled on beneath the words.

”And this one, exactly this one that I am lying on, in the cognac. For my Master’s office.”

”For me,” Kaiden said, amused.

”For your office,” Bastet corrected serenely, not opening her eyes. ”Where I will be spending all my time so long as you’re working...”

Marcus wrote it all down. At the end, he read back a total that had commas in places totals rarely earned commas, and Kaiden approved it without moving, on account of the queen on his lap.

Somewhere in the aisles, Calypso called out that she had found a massage chair, that it was fighting her, and that everyone should come watch it try.

...

They surfaced from the showroom an hour deep into the afternoon, three floors of furniture heavier, and Eclipse’s monster girls hit the mall proper.

Kaiden did not see his mother once the entire afternoon, which was exactly how he knew she was close. The shadows between the shopfronts ran a shade deeper than the lighting could account for, and they kept pace with the family without ever being anywhere anyone looked.

”Mom guards the flank,” Bastet observed, taking his arm again and pitching it low enough that it traveled the width of his collar and no further.

”She’s running errands.”