“Do you mean, a Mini was already invented?!?” Mini asked


    “Yeah, the Fellarians knew those things for, I think, forever.” the taller one confirmed.


    “Not that long." the fatter interrupted "It''s around for a century or so. There was this alchemist, who made a fortune out of it. He even got to cater to one of the big imperial celebrations! He got a statue in the end! I saw it with my own eyes!"


    Mini was certain, that the jealous alchemist, who stole her unique and perfect idea was a Traveler too. No sane Arkadian native would have the idea to mix different kinds of alcohol together! What would be the point? What next? Put some meat, vegetables, and sauces between two slices of bread, and call it a new invention. Laughable!


    Heh, even give it some idiotic name, like “market town on grainy soil”. Maybe in some archaic language, so it sounded more interesting and posh. Thinking about it, Homokvásár sounded posh enough. Maybe she should experiment with that, instead of her other, already stolen idea.


    But no. She wasn’t completely crazy – no one would eat such things. Vegetables were there to feed them to actual food.


    Well, they said, she was the wrong kind of crazy, back home. Not fit to lead the Estate after the Duke and the Duchess, well, not necessarily died (that was hard for undead), but retired to do things, retired monarchs did. Probably breed dangerous monsters or maybe little dogs. But no, she had to be Sociopathic – not caring about rules was allegedly bad for upholding rules, they said.


    Not, that Mini saw anything wrong in not being interested in rules.


    Why couldn''t she just be Paranoid, Egoistic, or a normal Psychopath? Superiority complex? Kleptomaniac? Compulsive liar? Corrupt? Narcissistic? All those would have worked for a new leader! Even nymphomania! After all, there was this Estate with nymphs in the East of Forestdeep, and their economy was flourishing!


    They said this and said that. The bottom line was, they thought, she wasn’t perfect! Didn’t deserve to rule the Estate some unknown time in the future! They were clearly wrong! She was perfect, and she deserved everything! Well, the good stuff she deserved.


    “Excuse me, Miss! Could we finish this?” one of the ingredients distracted her from her musings.


    “Oh, yeah. Where were we? You won’t provide me with fun, you can’t run away for a nice hunt, and I don’t need ingredients anymore. Hmm… All right! You will bribe me, not to have fun with you any way I want! Bribing beautiful girls you still can do!”


    Well, normally, it went the other way: males bribing females with stuff to do stuff with each other. But the logic still held up: if you wanted something to happen – for example, walking away still alive – you were willing to fork up some funds.


    Normally, that would have been called a robbery, but who would hold it against the most perfect Vampire in all of Arkadia? While said Vampire was armed to the (very sharp) teeth, and you weren''t? It was almost like taxes: you may grumble, about how much of your salary was stolen, but you paid nevertheless. Or paid someone to do creative bookkeeping.


    “Bribe you with what?!” the fatter one asked


    “The horse, Sepp.” the other one answered


    “It’s not a horse, it’s a Nightmare! I haven’t even paid the mortgage on my poor mount off!”


    “Oh, you have a Nightmare?”


    “Yes, Miss!”


    “Wrong answer! I have a Nightmare, you have nothing! Well, you still can have nightmares, if you want. I can provide you with a lot of those!”


    “Yes, Miss. No, thank you, Miss!”


    Mini was satisfied. These lowly peasants were willing to give her a very nice and expensive mount, all willingly and voluntarily, just because of her splendid perfectness! They were even nice enough not to saddle her with the boring effort of giving them nightmares!


    All right, if Mini were completely crazy, Oblivious, and stupid, she would have thought so. But she wasn''t! She was well aware, she just exhorted a valuable animal from idiots. Not, that she cared. She wasn''t crazy enough for that.


    “Lead the way, maggots!” she probably needed to wrap up all this foiled robbery turned successful robbery soon. Her minions were probably already done with their epic, but at the same time pedestrian quests to do… something or other. She distinctly remembered, her future concubine giving directions to the other minions. Retrieve this, get that, steal soap and towels from the inn.


    Whatever.


    If she took too long, Prof would probably whine and make faces. A few more hours surely wouldn''t make any difference anyway. She could play with her food a little bit longer.


    Of course, she was not prepared to let these idiots go. That would make a wrong precedent! Give an awesome Vampire lip, don''t provide her with the promised fun, and just walk away? No way! She would be the laughingstock of everyone!


    She may reign in cruelty and torture and every other fun thing, she could do to and with other people, but… Naw. What would be the fun of that? Actually, she should put a sign on the corpses, ''This happens, if you piss me off'' or something in that line. That would teach every other wrong-doer, not to mess with her!


    On second thought, if wrong-doers learned their lessons, they wouldn’t try to mess with her in the future. They were accommodating and nice enough to search her out – if they stopped doing that, she would need to search for fun and stuff to kill.


    So, probably no signs.


    But, what could possibly go wrong?


    Would the Greenskins send some kind of investigator after her, or a group of enforcers would show up at the most inopportune moment?


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Nah, impossible!


    The two morons led her (not exactly surprisingly) to a stable – it looked exactly like every other Greenskin architecture. Looking around, Mini had to concede that greenskins were even excellent to their animals. The stable looked more comfortable than the average boner garage at home. On the other hand, mindless skeleton slaves didn''t need that much comfort. You could just usher them into any room, and they would stand around until you retrieved them again.


    That, and the average peasant wouldn''t want to fork out the money for some fancy housing for tools. Getting spare skeletons was easy, you just had to dig up a graveyard (if the previous relatives were so inconsiderate to bury their dead and not sell them to a necromancer) or kill some stranger.


    Well, killing strangers was somewhat frowned upon in Forestdeep; sometimes they had relatives, friends, or superiors, who took offense at the untimely death of said stranger. So, either the one with a need for fresh bodies was intelligent enough to just kill strangers without ties, or he was prevented from procreation.


    Most just left strangers alone, or more likely, informed the local ruler. Very few complained to a ruler because of a lost person. If they did, it mostly led to a fun little war. That, consequently, led to a surplus of dead bodies.


    And everyone was happy.


    Except for merchants, specializing in dead bodies, obviously. If there was a surplus of goods, prices fell naturally. This was circumvented by body merchants also dealing in live merchandise. Live people could be made into dead people if the need arose, after all. Well, dead people could be made into semi-dead or undead ones too. Knives and necromancers were fabulous inventions!


    Mini took a look around the stables. It was mostly occupied by different kinds of hogs, but there were a few horses and one or two other animals too. She immediately found her new mount too – a Nightmare had a certain presence. In the wilds, that mostly consisted of panicked shouts or pained screams of random victims. In the stable, there were only various grunts and neighs, but also some challenges of the more carnivorous hogs.


    Predators didn’t like competition.


    She didn''t like competition either. There were only so many people, who would be allowed to kill, rob, and maim folks when she was present. That number was exactly one. Well, she was generous (in the Bergian meaning of the word), so her minions could have fun too. In moderation, and after she gave them the go-ahead.


    “Nice Nightmare. Papers. Now." Mini wasn''t stupid. In most countries – not in Forestdeep, though – dangerous animals, beasts, monsters, and mounts had to have ownership papers, indicating the owner on their Character Parchment wasn''t enough. It was the influence of those boring Elves – making redundant rules, no normal person would care about. Stupid foreigners just adopted those stupid rules!


    Not, that some registration certificate or ownership permit prevented anyone from stealing mounts. Everyone with a high enough [Forgery] could make new papers.


    The whole thing was just invented to annoy her! Luckily, she wasn''t paranoid though, so she was almost certain, the registration card thing wasn''t some world-spanning conspiracy.


    Hopefully, at least.


    “Here you go, Miss. May we leave now?" the previous owner of her newest Nightmare asked. Mini faced a very serious question. Of course, it wasn''t if the morons could leave – the answer to that was a resounding no – but how to dispatch them. Shooting them in the back was a classic, but also quite boring. Just hacking and slashing them to pieces missed style. Hanging them by their intestines till death sounded a bit messy. Oh, wait!


    She could take inspiration from those famous and celebrated blood poets from back up North. Mini didn''t exactly like most of the poetry – she was more of a pulp fiction gal – but they made wonderful sculptures too. Dead bodies, arranged in allegories and depictions of famous occurrences – like The Mage, The Serpent and The Boys, Ecstasy of the Woman, Monsterhunter with a Head, Defeated Monsterhunter. Allegory of Pride, The Cardplayers, and many, many more.


    Her Duke commissioned one sculpture too, Death and Rebirth. With carefully applied magic, the bodies were good for at least a few millennia.


    She could make a sculpture, or a "diorama" as the poets called the compositions! Well, her [Art: whatever was needed] wasn''t exactly high, she suspected, even Prof with his childish drawing was better… No, that wasn''t possible. It was impossible, anyone was better than her in anything! She was perfect and deserved every accolade!


    So, diorama… Maybe… Yes! She would call hers The Smiling Drunks!


    In order to keep the prospective material presentable, she needed to cut a throat just like this and shoot the fleeing other moron in the back just like this. Since she was magnificent and a lot of other things too, she managed to cut and shoot perfectly.


    Of course, failure wasn’t an option!


    First, even her [Daggers] was high enough to kill an unsuspecting moron, and second, she was just perfect and excellent. Just to be sure, she stuck an awesome pose. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a mirror nearby, so the pose was just for the general awesomeness of it. And for everyone, who would be watching.


    Unfortunately, only the animals were watching. Bad luck.


    Mini decided, she definitely needed to get one of those picture-capturing magical trinkets. Immortalizing her (almost) immortal self was a priority.


    In the end, she opted out of making a diorama out of the freshly dead drunkards. Of course, she could make an awesome one, she was awesome that way, but surveying the scene, it looked too much like actual work.


    As stated previously, Mini wasn’t stupid, only slightly insane. Actually, with all those points in Intelligence, she subconsciously realized, that making some awesome piece of art needed a Talent, or at least Skill. Having none of the above, she just invented an excuse. Well, making art actually could look like hard work, if one squinted the right way.


    Especially those art forms, that worked with stone and metals.


    Anyways.


    After dumping the corpses in an empty stall – minus a few parts, that she fed to her new Nightmare – she left for the meeting place. She decided to gift the mount to her future husband-slash-concubine. Of course, without the papers. If the impossible happened, and Prof left her, she would still hold on to the mount, the house, and the boat. Well, they didn''t have a house and a boat yet, but as soon as they got one, she would hold on to those too. Maybe Prof would finally buy a wagon too!


    Thinking about Prof, Mini was sure, he would make a fantastic Vampire in the future. It would be fun to find out, what kind of craziness he would pick up during the ritual. Probably nothing serious – Mini in all her glory was almost sane, after all. On the other hand, not everyone could be as awesome as her.


    On the way out of the riotous city, she debated to participate in the festivities but decided against it in the end. Multiple homicides (and three greenskincides), grand theft Nightmare, and hard-core public indecency were enough for one night. The arson part wasn''t her fault!


    Of course, Greenskins were notoriously excellent, and when one party of rioters noticed her looking longingly at the aflame barricades, they offered her a stall to set on fire.


    She declined. Arson was only fun when it was illegal; being offered something to burn wasn''t arson, but making a campfire. And she wasn''t a pyromaniac. Those folks were a menace! They set fire to a completely good orgy like her uncle-cousin-grandsomething (actually, there was a word for that relation in Forestean) did. While she was participating!


    The riot was starting to get boring, Mini decided. Without willful destruction, what sense did it make in the first place? Hopefully, Prof had some funny story to tell! Knowing him, he surely found himself in some epic struggle, uncovering a conspiracy, helping a nice cult''s struggle for world domination, or… Hey! Maybe he found a new female!


    But no, he just stunk…