Jude read the item description a second time and then a third.
SYSTEM SHOP — ITEM DETAILS
Palico (with built-in cart) Price: 1,000,000 AP
Once per day: retrieves any object or person from a near-death state and returns them to a safe area. 100% success rate. Cannot be intercepted.
Built-in Honeybug Attraction Incense: When the user is injured, teleports a healing honeybug to restore a fixed amount of HP in combat. No usage limit; 30-second cooldown. Proficiency feature: at max proficiency, activates when struck by a potentially fatal attack.
Built-in Protective Shield: Taunts nearby enemies, drawing their aggression. Proficiency feature: defensive capability and taunting strength scale with use.
Innate Cat Food Skill: Prepares dishes based on available ingredients. Rare ingredients produce higher stat bonuses.
Innate Combat Skill: Employs cat-specific weapons and maneuvers to harass enemies. Relatively low damage output. Cannot truly die — enters an exhausted state instead, fully concealing its presence and beginning self-recovery.
Note: Additional cat equipment, armor, and skills sold separately. Note: Meow.
Jude sat with this for a moment.
"Okay," he said. "First of all — if a genuinely threatening woman wants to ambush me and claim me as some kind of trophy, I'm not necessarily opposed to rescue, but I reserve the right to evaluate the situation before committing to an answer."
He scrolled back up to the price.
"One million. For a cat." He looked at the skill list again. "In any honest assessment — this is an absurd set of abilities for something you carry in a pocket. Daily extraction from near-death. Infinite combat healing with a proficiency curve. Enemy taunt scaling. A built-in cook." He closed the shop. Opened it again. "If I ran into this in a game I'd call it overpowered and keep using it anyway."
The price was the price. He wasn't at a million AP yet. But the fact that the item existed was useful information — it meant the system's ceiling was considerably higher than he'd been assuming, and that the things worth working toward were worth working toward in a serious way.
He filed it under eventual and got back to the cart.
There was never a shortage of work.
Three months since the accelerator explosion. Barry Allen was still unconscious at Star Labs, which was exactly where the timeline needed him to be, and the Central City Police Department was having a quieter-than-usual stretch of caseload, which had produced something Jude hadn't anticipated when he first started positioning the cart near the precinct.
Joe West ate lunch outside now.
Not always — but enough that Jude had started reading the patterns. The detective had the posture of a man who'd been under sustained pressure for months and was only recently beginning to surface from it, the kind of tiredness that doesn't clear all at once but shows up one day as slightly fuller cheeks and eyes that had started focusing on things other than whatever they'd been fixed on before.
Inside the precinct, the change registered differently.
Eddie was eating a yomogi mochi at his desk when Joe arrived — small, pale green, the mugwort giving it its color and faint herbal fragrance, red bean paste folded inside. He was chewing thoughtfully while reviewing a file, which was a habit Joe had started to recognize: Eddie processed paperwork better with something in his hands.
"If Inspector Singh walks past, put that away," Joe said, sitting down.
"He won't say anything." Eddie glanced toward Joe's desk. "There's some on your table. Jimmy brought them in — he's half-Japanese, picks these up from the cart down the street when he finds it. Thought everyone should try them."
Joe looked. There was indeed a small stack of yomogi mochi wrapped in paper sitting beside his coffee cup. He picked one up and bit into it without particular expectation.
The texture landed first — soft, with the slight resistance of good mochi, the glutinous rice and mugwort working together without either overwhelming the other. The red bean paste was properly made: smooth, not cloyingly sweet, with enough depth that the flavour continued for a moment after you swallowed.
"Hm." Joe chewed. "It's like someone figured out how to put green tea and a good dessert into the same thing." He picked up a second one. "Surprisingly good. Where's this cart you're talking about?"
"Across the street, usually. Moves around a lot."
Joe glanced toward the window. He'd noticed the cart that morning — he'd actually been on the verge of walking over to tell the operator to move it, on the grounds that the crowd around it was narrowing the sidewalk to an annoying degree. He hadn't, because something had pulled him back inside before he finished the thought.
"I'll swing by on the way out," he said. "Pick some up."
He ate a third mochi and turned his attention back to the files.
Plans never keep pace with circumstances.
Iris appeared at the precinct entrance before Joe had finished his last stack of paperwork, which was unusual — she was a graduate student with a flexible schedule, but she didn't often come to the station. When she did, it was generally about Barry.
Behind Joe, Eddie Thawne looked up from his desk with the particular attentiveness of someone who'd been waiting, without quite admitting it, for something to look up for.
Joe didn't notice.
"Iris. What's happened?"
"Nothing's happened. I just want to go see Barry again today." She slid her hands into her coat pockets. "Wells mentioned there's a possibility — a real one, he thinks — that Barry might wake up soon. I wanted to go while it's still light."
Joe was already standing, reaching for his coat. Three months of this rhythm — day shifts at the precinct, evenings at Star Labs, the slow stabilization of Barry's readings functioning as the only metric Joe had to measure his own mood against. He'd handed his son to Harrison Wells with the desperate pragmatism of a man choosing the least-bad option, and it had not gone wrong in the ways he'd feared.
That didn't mean he'd stopped fearing it.
"I'll come with you. Haven't been in two days."
Iris glanced back at Eddie. Eddie's expression did something subtle and quickly contained. She turned and followed her father toward the door.
"You believe Wells?" she asked.
"I believe Barry's readings have been improving." Joe held the door. "Which is more than I could say three months ago."
Outside, the late afternoon light was doing its best impression of something warm. Joe's gaze went automatically across the street to where the food cart had been parked since morning.
The cart was gone.
He stood on the steps and looked at the empty stretch of sidewalk with the expression of a man who has mildly but specifically looked forward to something and arrived to find it unavailable. The disappointment was modest, precise, and completely disproportionate to its cause.
"Dad?" Iris watched him. "What is it?"
"Nothing." He straightened up and started walking. "Let's go see Barry."
He thought about the mochi for another half block and then let it go.