Lluvia
It didn’t feel like time was passing as we flew. Time has felt kind of off since I stopped sleeping. Partly it’s missing the delineation of days we got by sleeping between them, and partly it’s the blackouts. This felt different, like we were floating apart from everything. With the water completely still, it was easy to believe that we were staying in one place while a strong wind was blew in our faces. Or maybe I was just in a weird state of mind after being kidnapped, sleeping for six weeks, and then blowing up a dragon.
Then the rain hit. First it was like walking into a mist but the drops got larger and closer together and we were quickly drenched. The sea was no longer flat, but covered in frothy waves that didn’t reflect the stars, which were hiding behind the fast-moving clouds. I couldn’t tell if the rain posed a problem for Aaron, but for now he didn’t falter. And land was in sight. A forest, and some watch-towers, and… it was hard to make out what with all the rain.
Lara woke up and started looking around frantically. I grabbed onto her so she wouldn’t fall. “What is that?” she asked in confusion, pointing at the towers.
“It wasn’t there before?”
“No, there was a city here, but it was different. Those towers look kind of dilapidated. They didn’t used to have those bites taken out of them.”
We were getting closer to the city, and could see more details despite the growing downpour. What I had taken for watch-towers were twisted metal and concrete structures rising high above smaller buildings. Some of the flat sides on the towers had gouges down them like some giant claws had slashed at the towers. I did not want to meet whatever did that. The other buildings didn’t look in very good shape, either. A lot had holes in them or seemed on the point of falling over. It was obvious the city had been abandoned to the elements – and probably monsters – for a while.
“You said this was a normal, functional city?” I asked Lara in confusion as we landed on what appeared to be the main road. The rain had gotten so strong Aaron was having trouble keeping aloft. We would have to proceed on foot to wherever it as we were going.
“What?” she yelled back over the downpour and I repeated my question in a louder voice. “Oh yeah, it was full of people, big trade and science hub. I was here a couple months ago to get supplies, and went to a conference last year.”
“Let’s go!” said Clarence, tugging me in a seemingly random direction. His mouth formed some more words but I couldn’t understand them. The rain was somehow getting harder, drowning out most other sound.
“What?”
“We should get out of the rain!” he yelled.
“Oh! Okay!” I could get behind that plan.
We trudged our way down the street towards what might have been the center of town. Given the weather we would have preferred to sprint, but the ankle-high water made that impossible. And Lara wasn’t up for sprinting anyway. She hadn’t stopped shivering since the rain had started and looked very pale. She wasn’t walking so much as stumbling along while clutching at my shoulder.
At the end of the street was a T-shaped intersection. We looked left. Several hundred meters away was a dark blue bird with two heads, more than twenty meters tall and as wide as the street. I checked its hit points. 500/500. Clarence must have done the same because he yelled “NOOOOPE!” and started dragging Aaron, who had been in front, back around the corner. We slogged our way back down the street, hoping the bird hadn’t seen us.
Aaron noticed something and pulled me into a doorway. “In here!” I think he said, but it was hard to tell. It was a partially destroyed building, but it offered a little protection from the rain. A short ways of picking over debris, we found a door. Aaron banged on it to no avail. I tried the handle and it opened, a small flood of silty water cascading past our feet into the room.
It was a small bunker, sparsely furnished, with a drain in the corner. The sound of rain was muffled, a welcome relief from the clamor outside. There was someone sitting on the bed, who looked up from polishing a broadsword when we opened the door.
“Even if you’re going to kill me for my hideout, would you at least close the door to make me feel better?” he asked in a plaintive voice. “I don’t want the rain to get in. But it always gets you eventually, maybe it doesn’t matter...”
“Oh, okay! I promise we’re not crazy anymore.” I reassured him. On second thought that might not have been very helpful. The man did have a sword, so I didn’t want to alarm him. Oh, well. I dragged Lara inside and motioned for the others to follow. The man on the bed didn’t seem surprised that one of us was a dragon. On the contrary, he seemed resigned to his fate, whatever it was.
Once all of us were inside, the current inhabitant got up and started cranking a handle. There was a metal grinding in the walls of the bunker like a lot of gears were turning. A metal shutter came down from the ceiling to cover the door we’d come through, then extra bars extended across it in an interlocking pattern.
“Okay,” he said in what turned out to be an uncharacteristically strong fit of optimism. “We should be good now. The hut is locked down against the rain and the small flood you brought in will soon finish draining.”
“Seriously, what’s with the rain?” Clarence asked.
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Aaron, could you stop being a dragon? It’s kind of cramped in here and I think you’re scaring this guy.”
“I am not scared,” said the man in an expressionless voice, “merely indifferent to my eventual doom. Everyone is doomed eventually, after all.” He drew his sword dramatically, after somehow having put it away without me noticing.
“Oh… kay.” I paused to digest that. “So! What’s with all the rain?”
“The Rain Bird has come,” he explained in a tone that suggested we should already know this. “When the Rain Bird comes you must take shelter or be crushed by the downpour.”
“That giant two-headed bird?”
“You saw it!?”
“Yeah, it had a lot of hit points so we ran away. Hold on, can you see hit points? Like if you squint at a mon and they have a number?”
“Can’t everyone?”
“I can’t!” volunteered Lara, who was sitting on the floor, still shivering. “These weirdos apparently can though, since they used to have Steve-spirals.”
“Huh,” said the man, staring at a spot slightly above my head.
“Do you need to eat?” Clarence asked suspiciously. “Or drink or sleep or breathe?”
“No,” said the man unconcernedly. “Why would I need to do that?”
“I need to do those things!” Lara protested. “Speaking of which, where did you put my beans?”
Clarence, who had been holding the pillowcase of cans Lara had insisted we take along, placed it on the floor next to her. She took one out, pried the lid open, and started slurping beans directly from the can. The man watched her with a look of mixed interest and disgust.
He didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep, just like us. And he could see hit points. For us, it had been the effects of the Steve-spirals, and they’d lasted even after Lara’s team abducted us and surgically removed them. But he couldn’t have a Steve-spiral; as far as I knew the ones Ace had found or made or… whatever were the only ones in existence. And we could remember when we needed to breathe, it had been less than two years since we had been what we’d consider normal humans. But this guy thought all this was normal.
Obviously we were missing something.
“What’s your name?” I asked, because thinking of him as “this guy” was getting annoying.
“Terrence.”
We introduced ourselves.
“Terrence and Clarence,” said Lara sleepily. She’d taken some more painkillers and was starting to curl up next to her beans. “It rhymes! We should write a poem about you.”
“And Lara and Sarah,” I added. “It’s a slant rhyme, but good enough.”
“Who am I supposed to rhyme with?” Aaron wondered in mock despair. “You’ll have to kill me off because I don’t fit with any sound devices.”
“Or you could become a baron,” I offered. “Baron Aaron works. We just have to find you a barony. Nobody will stop you when you take control, you’re a dragon!”
Terrence stared at us with mild interest, like he couldn’t figure out what we were doing or why, and while it was slightly amusing, it didn’t really matter, since nothing mattered. We stared back at him, not really sure what to say.
Aaron eventually broke the silence with more questions. “Where does the Rain Bird come from? How long are we going to have to stay here?”
Terrence looked up with a seemingly great effort. “The Rain Bird? It’s been around a long time. It goes where it wants, and we have to hide in our huts. They’re the only true protection from the rain. It might go on for a few hours, or for days. The hut will ding when it’s safe to go out again.”
“Handy,” I commented. “How does it know?”
“But the Rain Bird,” Aaron continued. “You haven’t tried to fight it or anything?”
“Who could possibly defeat the Rain Bird?” Terrence asked hopelessly. “Many have tried to defeat it and none have succeeded. We gave up long ago. Except for the stupid people, they still go fight the Rain Bird and die.”
“If there was, say, the Sun Cat, could that defeat the Rain Bird?”
“Don’t be silly, the Sun Cat is a story for children. It isn’t real.”
Aaron looked like he was going to say something, then walked over to the far corner and started drawing in the mud left on the floor with the end of a pencil lying on the small table next to the bed. “I’m trying to get oriented,” he explained, motioning Terrence over. “This is the continent, right? And I think we’re about here, if I’m not mistaken. Can you fill in the details?”
Terrence took the pencil and added a point to Aaron’s continent, then started drawing a more detailed map. It didn’t look familiar to me, but I don’t know that much about geography. “We are here, in the main city in Lluvia, and there’s the sea, and the mountains and the chasm. The chasm’s the edge of the region. That’s where I’m heading, there’s a village near the mountains near the edge of Lluvia I have to make a delivery to.”
“A delivery?” I asked.
“I’m a courier,” Terrence explained. “Neither rain,” he recited unenthusiastically, “nor rain, nor rain, nor rain would stop us in our mission if we had any hope of success; we’ll probably lose your package.”
This motto was absolutely perfect for Terrence’s dreary personality.
“Must be an interesting job,” Clarence commented brightly. “You get to see a lot of the countryside.”
Terrence nodded. “Mostly it tries to kill me. There’s monsters all over the place, and I only have Ooziel.”
“Ooziel?”
“My mon. I won’t summon him now, conserving energy. I used to have eight mons but now it’s just Ooziel.”
It was interesting that the term mon had also caught on in wherever Terrence was from. It hadn’t been that long since mons appeared, so the word must be spreading fast.
“What happened to the others?”
“They were stolen. There’s people who beat you up for your mons. My broadsword was not good enough against them. And then there’s the Rain Bird which just makes everything rain forever.” He sighed like a gust of chilly, damp fog that made everything depressing. “And sometimes the people I’m supposed to deliver a package to are dead when I get there, so I don’t even get paid.”
“How often does that happen?”
“About 70 percent of the time.”
Uhhhhhh…. “Wow, so being a courier must be a safe job in comparison.”
“It’s not. I am not dead yet, but it’s just a matter of time.”
On that depressing thought, we lapsed into silence. Clarence dozed off. Terrence stared into space. I moved Lara to the bed in hopes she would sleep better but she just seemed feverish and twitchy. Then I retrieved the pencil and started writing in the notebook I’d found lying on the table. It contained sketches and writing in many different handwritings, left over from the people who had sheltered in this hut over the years. I added the tale of our past day, starting with waking up in Lara’s facility. With all the memory loss we’ve been having, it is very reassuring to put down events in writing. Even if we leave it behind when we move on, it makes things seem more permanent and grounded.
I really hope the memory issues and blackouts are over. Lara said they should be, but that’s based on theoretical results and there’s no practical data except us. So who knows if we’re cured.
While I wrote, Aaron was examining Terrence’s pack. There was a package in waterproof wrapping, which Terrence wouldn’t let us open (he was duty-bound to protect it, and apparently protection included keeping us from looking at it). There was also Terrence’s medium, which Aaron found endlessly fascinating.
It was a palm-sized rectangle about an inch thick, which Terrence wore on his belt. It had very small screen, and holes where you could slot mons and spells in. It summoned mons like the Steve-spirals had; Terrence found our transformation-based mediums very strange, and said they reminded him of really old mediums. Which seemed pretty weird considering mediums had existed for less than two years – how old could he think they were?
Terrence had a few other medium-related things. Some tokens he could insert in the mon-slots in his medium, which had the effect of healing his currently summoned mon for a few hit points at a time over the next fifteen seconds. He also had a small cloth bag containing five dark blue glowing marbles, which pulsed slightly and smelled like cucumber.
“Soul fruit,” Terrence explained. “You can eat them for energy if you need it fast, otherwise you regenerate about one per day.”
“Soul fruit?” I looked up from writing, intrigued. “Where do they come from then?”
“They grow on vines and you can sometimes harvest them. But mostly they fall off of dead bodies.”
“Dead mons?” Aaron clarified.
“Yes. When mons run out of hit points, they turn into orbs. You can absorb them into your medium to tame them and be able to summon them later; or you can wait for them to turn into soul fruit. They don’t always do it though, sometimes the orb fades and you don’t get anything.”
“Wait, we can get energy by fighting mons?” Aaron’s faced morphed into his plotting expression. “Perfect! We can get out of here sooner, then. No need to wait eight days for me to recharge the energy to turn into a dragon again – we can go hunting!”
“What kind of mons are there around here?” I asked. Aaron’s plan was good, except if the only thing around was the Rain Bird, because I was absolutely not fighting that.
“There’s the Rain Bird right now of course, but the lizards always live here in Lluvia, especially this city.”
“Lizards?”
“Yes, there are giant lizards around here that like to eat people. You probably haven’t seen them because they are unfortunately sensible and hide when it rains. Some of them are about as big as my leg and not that dangerous but most of them are awful. Some of them can climb, and some have huge sticky tongues to grab you with. They’re all terrible.”
“And I suppose some are poisonous, eh?” I said with a sigh.
“Yes,” said Terrence seriously. “Purple and white are the colors of fright.”
I paused to enjoy Terrence’s unexpected foray into wordplay but Aaron forged ahead. “So let’s go! We can avoid the purple and white ones, they sound nasty. But the leg-sized ones sound totally doable.”
“You can’t go outside!” protested Terrence. “It’s raining!”
“We’re inside a building, how bad can it be?”
Terrence gave him an are-you-nuts look. “Terrible. You don’t believe me, do you? I would just let you go see for yourself, but if you opened the door I’d die too.”
“Can’t we look out a window, then?” Aaron looked around.
“We don’t put windows on a bunker. I had a friend who put windows on his bunker once. Once.”
“What happened?”
“He died. That’s why he only put windows on the once.”
“I’m sorry,” I volunteered.
“Fiiiine,” grumbled Aaron. “We’ll stay inside until the rain stops. How long do you think that’ll be?”
Terrence shrugged. “Who knows when the Rain Bird will decide to leave? You stay inside until the hut dings to let you know it’s safe. Or at least that you probably won’t die from opening the door. But sometimes the hut malfunctions and doesn’t ding. Or sometimes you’re asleep and don’t hear it. Or sometimes the Rain Bird doesn’t want to leave and the rain just goes on forever…”
Aaron was obviously getting annoyed at Terrence’s vague and dreary answers. “You can’t give me any kind of estimate? So right now it’s—” He glanced at his watch to check the time and froze, a look of shock on his face.
“What?” I looked over his shoulder. “I’m not surprised it’s four in the morning.”
“It’s updated the time when I wasn’t paying attention.”
I realized what he was looking at. The watch had a date function. In Lara’s facility it had read 12/01/905. Now it read 17/05/1159. “What,” I said. “But… what?”
“We have the technology to build these huts that will even ding to tell us when the Rain Bird has gone away,” Terrence pointed out with an expression of confusion. “Why are you surprised your watch gets satellite updates to keep better time?”
“The problem isn’t that it updates,” replied Aaron in an increasingly panicky voice. “The problem is that it updated 250 years since I last checked it like four hours ago!”
“What?” Clarence had woken up at Aaron’s outburst and was looking around in confusion. Lara was also stirring, but not awake enough to realize what madness we had stumbled upon.
“Apparently, we have somehow skipped over-- wait, is the watch correct?” I asked Terrence. “Is it really 1159?”
“1159?” repeated Clarence in bewilderment.
“Yes, of course it is, what year did you think it was?”
“905. That’s what the watch said yesterday when we were at the facility, before I turned into a dragon!”
“Hmmm…. The facility? What kind of facility?”
“It was a mon research facility on a boat.” I waved vaguely in the direction I thought the water was. “Out to sea a ways. Lara kidnapped us and we only woke up yesterday.”
“You came from there?” Terrence seemed genuinely surprised, which was a nice addition to his emotional range. “But nothing can get through the bubble.”
“Bubble?”
“There’s a shadowy bubble surrounding a patch of ocean. Records show there was a boat there, but nobody’s been able to get in to find out. I’ve never heard of anything getting out, either.”
“Well we got out,” Aaron insisted. “I flew us.”
Terrence looked skeptical, but shrugged.
“When you were saying our mediums seemed old,” I realized. “You meant they were from more than 200 years ago, when mediums were new?”
“Yes, 200-some years ago. Mediums really weren’t common? I’ve heard that it took a while to develop them after the Cataclysm but it’s just so strange to think about.”
“No, we’d just discovered them. We come from the time just before the gods went silent. You know about that? The early 900’s. Does this match with what you know?”
After some quizzing and counter-quizzing, we established that what Terrence did know about history – which wasn’t much, since most of the pre-incursion history was lost – matched up with what we remembered. So at least we probably weren’t in an alternate universe. Although who would really care if we were? Skipping forward 254 years might as well be going to a different universe.
Things had got chaotic around the time we skipped out, to the point that nobody now knows much about what it was like before the incursion started. I remember the people in the city being tense about the mons, and how the gods had gone silent, but it kept getting worse. There were more and more mons, coming from who knew where, and it took society a while to figure out how to deal with them. They soon figured out there were some new entities around. What were they? Had they had something to do with the old gods going silent? People weren’t sure what they were exactly, but they were definitely real. There were wars about it, which was probably Steve’s fault if you ask me. The Barbed Wheel, I mean. That’s what they call Steve around here, after the sun-symbol. Terrence says some other places have different names, but that’s the most common.
Eventually, someone figured out mediums. The early ones were unreliable and varied, but they eventually converged on a few designs that summoned mons rather than transforming. Once they had a reliable design, they formed the Rangers and started wider-scale taming of smaller mons. Capturing a few mons lets you capture more powerful ones, and you can kind of bootstrap restabilizing the countryside, up to a point. But it’s not like mediums would be much help against any of the really big mons, like the Rain Bird.
And at some point, the people became like us. Nobody in Terrence’s society needs to eat or sleep or breathe, although they still can do those things. It has changed society a bit, but not as much as you’d expect. A few people grow tasty plants for the novelty, but nobody has to farm to feed their town. They don’t put beds in their homes for everyday use, just in the rain-huts because a nap is a nice way to pass the time. There are no doctors, just people with healing spells. But people aren’t reckless and not needing to gather supplies hasn’t made life that much easier. Terrence carries a broadsword along with his Ooziel, and the world is plenty dangerous.
A little over a day later, the hut emitted a very cheery-sounding ding!
“The Rain Bird has gone,” intoned Terrence. He slowly and deliberately drew his broadsword. “We may now leave the hut and face our destiny.”
Somehow, he made it sound like he knew we were in for a terrible fate, but he put his sword away and opened the door anyway. I was half starting to wonder whether his doom-and-gloom thing was an act and he was secretly a drama queen enjoying having an audience.
I was pretty glad to get out of there and look around. Now that it was light out, and not raining, we could see the surrounding area. The hut was situated in the lobby of an old office building. There was a gaping hole in the second floor that made the room more spacious than originally designed, making the hut seem small. Through it I could see a layers of a dark papery substance, and a flickering flutter of wings.
Terrence noticed my gaze. “Bats,” he said. “They’re not mons. But I’ve head that they can—”
“What!?” While I’d been looking around the building, Clarence had ventured outside and apparently discovered something alarming. “The sun—! Oh, wait, it’s back to normal.”
“What happened?” Aaron asked him worriedly.
“I was enjoying the sunlight, and then the sun turned into that sun-symbol, the Steve one! And the sky went dark and weird and it was—!” he broke off, shivering.
“Really?” I turned my face to the sky to see for myself. After about a second of looking at the sun, it turned into the eight-rayed symbol. The formerly blue sky grayed out, and the lizard on a nearby building appeared gray as well. “Weeeird,” I concluded.
“I can see it, too,” reported Lara from the ground. She was still too weak to stand.
“Huh, so it’s not a side effect of the Steve spirals. Hey, Terrence!”
“What has happened?” Terrence poked his head out of the building and grimly drew his broadsword in preparation.
“Why is the sun weird?” Clarence demanded. “You can see it too, right?”
“Oh, dear. Has the sun started going out already? I knew this day would come.” He looked down at his sword contemplatively. Apparently Terrence was quick to draw his broadsword, and equally quick to put it away once it became clear that the situation was too hopeless for swords and he was already doomed. More fuel for my drama queen theory!
“What? No, it just turns into an eight-rayed thing when we look directly at it.”
“The Barbed Wheel.” Terrence cocked his head like we were being silly. “The sun has always been like that. We know that the Barbed Wheel is watching us.”
Well, that wasn’t creepy at all!
“No it hasn’t,” Clarence protested. “The sun used to be normal! If you looked at it, it would, you know, just stay the sun! All bright and shining in your eyes?” He looked at Terrence hopefully. “It was kind of annoying.” Pause. “I miss the old sun…”
“Aaaanyway,” interrupted Aaron. “We need to find some lizards to fight.”
The plan was to fight enough lizards to get Aaron back to full energy so he could turn into a dragon and fly us to our next destination. Which was the village where Terrence had to make a delivery. He hadn’t objected to our saving him several days of walking, just commented that we’d probably be unlucky enough to run into gas birds, and then we’d be sorry.
As for why we were following Terrence around, we didn’t have a very good reason. It was a direction to pick out of the daunting number of possibilities. And at least a village would have more people. Maybe one of them would have some idea what we should be doing. I’d been all ready to search for April, but that didn’t make much sense now that we’d learned about the time skip. She was probably dead by now. Or gone completely insane and killed a load of people since she would still have a Steve-spiral. Maybe we had some sort of duty to find her and stop her, but it seemed kind of late for that. And how would we find her anyway? We’d last seen her in a city that doesn’t exist anymore.
The other reason was Lara. I was hoping someone in the village would have a heal spell for her. She hadn’t been doing well when we found her, and dragging her through a rainstorm then hiding in a hut for a day and a half hadn’t improved matters. The bone had set nicely, but the gash on her leg was now infected, and I was pretty sure she had a fever. But it could have been that all of us don’t-need-to-breathe folks run colder than normal humans, it’s not like I had a thermometer. Or many other useful supplies. I had to settle for changing the bandages and giving Lara a multivitamin and some painkillers. But a village might have something.
Thinking of the bats, I had an idea. Lara also was probably a bit malnourished from her diet of beans and lack of sunlight. The bats might fix that, at least a little. They were normal animals, after all, so they’d leave corpses. We could roast them and give Lara a proper meal. Bats were perfectly fine to eat if you cooked them correctly.
So we hunted bats. Well, I hunted bats. Nobody else was very enthusiastic about the idea, so they built a fire while I climbed the stairs and then charged the nest with an attempt at a bloodcurdling yell and my crowbar. The layers of nest material split easily as I swiped at them. Many of the bats flew up through a smaller hole in the ceiling, but I managed to hit about half a dozen in the chaos.
Lara looked a little stronger after her non-bean meal, but wanted to stay sitting by the fire. We gathered her a pile of sticks so she could hit anything that tried to eat her, and headed upstairs to explore the building. True to form, Terrence slowly drew his broadsword with a look of resignation.
On the third floor, we found a large metal pipe running floor to ceiling. There was an opening on one side. I stuck my head in. “Wow, this goes way up!” I looked around. “And down. I think it comes out on the first floor.” I considered it. “It’s probably climbable…” The pipe was wide enough to accommodate a human but narrow enough it wouldn’t be too hard to brace against opposite sides of it.
“Just a second.” Terrence pulled me away from the pipe and summoned Ooziel. At his command, Ooziel zapped the pipe and a blue lizard which had been higher up in the pipe plummeted past the opening, stunned.
Wait, I need to describe Ooziel because he is adorable. When Terrence first summoned him, Ooziel was a blob. A black blob with little angel wings and big eyes. Ooziel can fly around, but not very well. He gets way worse at flying when he splits, though. Ooziel can violently split himself into two little blobs, each of which has one eye and one wing. The one wing means that the mini-Ooziels are terrible at steering – they pretty much just fly around in little circles. But they can arc lightning between them which makes them helpful for taking on large groups of mons.
The lizard hit the ground with a wet smack, and scampered off. I was a bit turned around but Aaron was well-oriented enough to assure us that it hadn’t run in Lara’s direction. I looked up the pipe again, then down at the spot on the floor where a bit of green blood was left from the lizard’s fall.
“On second though, let’s take the stairs,” I suggested, and we headed to the fourth floor, which was plain offices with no interesting weapons or supplies, and the fifth.
That’s where we found the wall, glowing brightly in the dim room (there wasn’t much natural light, as this was where vines started covering the windows). The wall itself didn’t glow; the glow came from the the blue pulses running through the web of lines overlaid on it. But it was a strange material in itself: metal at the bottom and glass at the top, and in the middle it was somehow a mix between metal and glass. Which isn’t how metal or glass works, I don’t think. Clarence seemed to think it was very strange, and transformed into the reaper to scythe out some sample chunks. The pulses continued running through them even as they were separated from the wall, entering and exiting just when they exited and reentered the places where they’d been cut from the wall. Terrence drew his broadsword in his usual overly dramatic way and poked one of the chunks like he was expecting it to attack him. Nothing happened.
After pulling Clarence away from the wall – five pieces of wall was really enough samples and we were running out of space in our pillowcase sack – we tried the fifth floor and found normal offices. Nothing useful in these, either, although I found a really old box of peppermints in a rusting metal desk.
“Guys?” Aaron prodded. “Can we get back to hunting lizards? I don’t think we’re going to find that much in here, it’s getting more destroyed as we go up. And we shouldn’t leave Lara alone for too long.”
Back on the first floor, Lara was fine and had not been eaten by anything. We put out the fire and set off in search of lizards. It took about half a block’s walk before Terrence spotted one about ten feet up the side of a building.
“It’s green,” he announced solemnly. “The most boring kind of lizard. A good choice; it doesn’t do anything interesting except chew you up into little pieces with its very sharp teeth.”
We prepared to attack. Clarence and I transformed into the reaper and the plague-thing respectively, and Terrence once again drew his broadsword and then called Ooziel over from where he’d been sliming a patch of wall. Aaron was conserving energy and Lara didn’t have a medium, so I gave Aaron my crowbar in case things went wrong.
Clarence charged the lizard first, running up the wall to whack it with his scythe. The clang of metal against concrete as it passed through the lizard attracted two more lizards, one green and one blue, which crawled out a second floor window. I threw a bomb at them in hopes of discouraging them but they kept coming. Ooziel flew over and enveloped the lizard Clarence had attacked, immobilizing it.
That’s when the blue lizard shot out its tongue and grabbed Clarence. Clarence clung to the wall, trying not to get pulled towards the lizard and its friend.
“What’s that about?” I yelled, preparing another bomb. I wasn’t sure if I could hit the lizards without catching Clarence in the blast, but blowing him up just a little seemed better than letting him get eaten.
“The blue ones always do that,” Terrence replied calmly. “They snag their prey and drag it within reach, then hold it still with their claws while they devour it. Ooziel, split!”
Ooziel exploded, showering the lizards with goo and lightning. There were now two Ooziels sticking themselves to the wall, one above the lizards and one below. I threw another bomb at the lizards, managing to distract them enough for Clarence to escape. He waved his scythe at the retreating tongue of the lizard who’d captured him, striking a glancing blow.
“Ooooh, split him again!” I heard Aaron urging. “You could have so many Ooziels!”
“No, I can’t,” replied Terrence gloomily. “Ooziel can only split once, after that I have to squish him back together before he can split again. Ooziel, lightning zap!”
An arc of lightning passed from one Ooziel to the other, catching the two green lizards and barely missing Clarence, who was running along the wall (sideways, how was he doing that?) to smash one of them with his scythe. One more bomb took care of the other two, and two soul fruit dropped to the ground.
“Only two?” I asked in disappointment, looking around for the third one. “Oh, here it is.”
“It’s enough, then,” Aaron confirmed. “The dragon takes eight energy. I have one, here’s three more, and Terrence has five more soul fruit, if you don’t mind me using them, Terrence?”
Terrence assented. “I do not want to fight more lizards right now; my poor Ooziel is injured. I am curious to see you turn into a dragon, even though taking to the skies is certain to attract trouble.”
So Aaron ate seven soul fruit (they tasted like cucumber as well as smelling like it), and turned into a dragon again.
“You are very large,” said Terrence. Apparently he couldn’t think of anything depressing to say.
We’d been in the air about half an hour when Clarence spotted something amid the forest. “Looks like a facility of some sort,” he said. We landed on the roof, and realized this had been a hospital. A hospital from our time, it looked like.
“It might have better medical supplies,” I said, hopping off Aaron’s back. “We need syringes, some tubing, and a blood-type kit, if we can find one.” Clarence and I had been discussing it on the flight: Lara was still weaker than she should have been, and I thought she needed a blood transfusion. Lara remembered her blood type was O+, which meant she was fairly picky about what kind of blood she’d take. I knew I was AB+, which would have been great if I’d been the one needing blood but useless here, and the others couldn’t remember their blood types so we needed to check. Leaving aside the fact that we didn’t know if our blood was at all compatible anymore. We didn’t need to breathe, so who knew if our blood even carried out the same function as Lara’s did.
The roof access door had rusted enough we could reach through it to turn the handle. The stairway was just big enough to accommodate Aaron as a dragon, if he hunched over. Terrence opted to stay outside with Lara and his ever-present broadsword, and Clarence and I followed Aaron in. The rooms on the next floor down would have been dark, except for the holes that had been punched in the walls, letting in shafts of light. The place had been ransacked at some point, cupboards emptied and drawers upended on the floor. And there was paper everywhere. Notes covered the walls and piled up on the floor like a mad scientist had been through.
“What is this?” wondered Clarence, pulling a sheet off the wall. “Does this make sense to you?”
Aaron stared at it for a while, then shook his head like he’d suddenly gotten a headache. “No, and it hurts to look at.” He pocketed it to investigate later.
I took a look at the wall, carefully not looking too closely at the writing. The notes were stuck to the wall with rivets. Why? None of it made sense, and who would bother riveting a bunch of individual sheets of paper to the wall? To all the walls in the room? I poked my head through a hole in the wall. Apparently the riveter had been to this room, too.
“This is creepy,” I said flatly. “I think we should leave.”
“Yeah, there’s nothing—” Aaron broke off. I turned around. There was a Tall Man standing in the corner. But it was wrong. This one was taller than me or Clarence, but that tall. Tall Men were always taller than the tallest person in the room. And it was wearing a white lab coat and carrying a rivet gun.
“What—?” I started to say, raising my crowbar, but the Tall Man waggled its fingers at us and vanished. Looking out another hole in the wall, I saw it reappear on the roof of a lower section of the building.
“That’s not how Tall Men work!” Clarence complained as we hurried back up the stairs to the roof. “Why would hit have a rivet gun? Who even uses rivets anymore?”
Terrence didn’t say I told you so when we came dashing out of the stairwell, but we could tell he was thinking it. The next ten minutes of flight were uneventful, right up until we came upon the gas-birds.
There were to of them, pink and black giant birds. They had two long floppy wings and a long floppy neck leading to a head with a long beak poking out from behind a mask. Everything about them was floppy; they moved like they were fish out of water but somehow managed to stay in the air, lurching along in wide circles around some ruins.
“Oooh,” said Clarence and I in unison. We’d noticed the hit points: only 35, not too many. Aaron after all had 40.
“Gas birds. They are very dangerous.” Terrence paused, then said in a brighter tone: “It is possible that we can fight them instead of running away.”
“Really?”
“No.” Terrence went back to his usual gloominess. “I was trying out this optimism thing you people seem so good at. How did I do?”
“Not great, but it was a good try. Let’s try fighting these things!”
Instead of replying, Terrence drew his broadsword with an air of long-suffering resignation.
Surprisingly, it worked, sort of. Mostly because we could coordinate attacks, and fly away whenever the birds looked like they were going to attack, since Aaron was faster than them. Also Aaron’s fire was very effective. When one bird had dropped to 5 hp, its mask fell off plummeting to the ground. It whipped its head around before we could see what was under the mask, and then started attacking the other bird. The birds were vicious when fighting each other, so we retreated before the surviving bird got done murdering its maskless companion and came after us. I was curious what the mask did, but going back for it didn’t seem worth the trouble.
We arrived in the village in the late afternoon. The people seemed a little surprised to see a dragon, but nothing like they would have been in the kind of village I remembered. Transformation mediums weren’t the norm around here, but people knew about them so a dragon was almost certainly a human. Who was still a little worrying because they’d defeated a dragon, or had the resources to pay someone who had.
The doctor was happy enough to fix Lara, and promised she’d have her better in short order. She raised a gauntletted hand and a bolt of light shot out of it. Instead of hitting Lara like I’d expected, the bolt dissipated around her. The doctor checked her medium, shook it, then looked at Lara in confusion.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do. The heal spell didn’t work.” She sat silently for a few seconds, then started rummaging through drawers. “A tricky one! We’ll try the diagnostic scanner.” She waved a device at Lara, then pointed it at a screen on the far wall.
A diagram of Lara’s body appeared on the wall. A perfectly normal human, right out of my anatomy textbook except for the left leg, which was obviously having a problem. The doctor didn’t think so, though.
“She doesn’t have enough blood!” she exclaimed in horror.
“Well, yes, she’s had some blood loss and I think she’s anemic, we were going to try a blood transfusion. I don’t suppose you have the materials for that or at least a blood-type test kit?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” said the doctor distractedly, “I don’t have much in the way of supplies, heal spells work for just about everything. But it looks like she’s not a valid target for heal spells. And she doesn’t have nearly enough blood! Only five liters!”
I was pretty sure that was a normal amount of blood for a human. “How much should she have?”
“Twenty liters, of course. But she’s got all this stuff in here instead!” she gestured at the screen with a laser pointer, indicating Lara’s abdomen which was filled with organs as it should be. “No wonder she doesn’t have enough blood! And her lungs are enormous, I don’t understand what’s wrong with her. How is she possibly still alive?”
“Could you scan me?” I asked after checking carefully and finding that Lara had exactly as many organs as I would have expected.
The doctor shrugged and waved the device at me, and another scan appeared on the wall besides Lara’s. She squinted at it. “You have all those extra organs, too,” she said suspiciously. “And you don’t have enough blood, only eight liters. But you seem fine! What’s wrong with you people?” My lungs were smaller than I’d expected, though. But maybe they were atrophying due to not needing to breathe?
“This might be a good time to mention that Lara needs to eat and breathe,” interrupted Aaron, who was still a dragon. “She needs lungs for that, to oxygenate the blood.”
“No, lungs are totally useless, blood is oxygenated in the heart.”
“What? No, that is not—”
“Wait, you said she needs to breathe?” the doctor interrupted me. “And eat? Come on, nobody needs to eat. You mean she really likes food?”
“No, she needs to eat.”
“She gets mad at you if she doesn’t eat? I’ve heard of that. It’s not very common, but it does happen.”
“I need to eat or else I’ll die!”
The doctor stared at Lara in disbelief. “You’re joking, right?”
“No.”
“Huh! You’re too weird to do anything with, my heal spells don’t work on you and that’s all I’ve got. We’ll have to call in some experts.” She sounded excited at the prospect.
“Hey! Where are you going?” I had noticed Terrence sneaking out the back.
“I’m making my delivery,” he explained with a surprising amount of pride. “I am even on time! You seemed busy so I thought I’d leave.”
“No! We have to come with you, I want to see what’s in the package!”
“They don’t usually open it in front of me….”
“Maybe if we bring a dragon along it will help! You can look threatening, right Aaron?” I grabbed his hand ...um, claw, and pulled him out the door after Terrence.
“Um….”
“I knew it,” grumbled Terrence. “You eat my soul fruit, you decide to fight a gas bird, and now you’re threatening my customers.” But he didn’t stop us following him down the road to a light green cottage.
“Delivery!” Terrence banged on the door with all the enthusiasm of a wet fish. With his gloomy tone, it sounded more like a prophecy of doom than a summons. “I’ve got your package, come pick it up. Unless you’re dead of course.”
“Just a minute!” called a familiar voice. Clarence and I looked at each other, then looked at Aaron. Being a dragon, Aaron’s face was a bit hard to read, but I figured he was trying to express the same shock Clarence and I were feeling. What was April doing here?
She opened the door, and it was the same April I’d seen just a few conscious days ago. She didn’t look surprised to see Clarence or me, or that we were accompanied by a dragon.
“April?” asked Clarence.
“Sign for delivery?” Terrence prompted hopefully, holding out the package and a slip of paper.
“Where have you been?” I demanded.
“Just a minute,” said April serenely, signing the slip and opening the package. She pulled out a fist-sized blue-green gem glowing with an unearthly light.
“No!” I insisted. “We skipped over two hundred years and you’ve been—”
April smiled, and vanished.
“Really?” asked Clarence in exasperation. “We finally find her and she vanishes?”
Terrence was unsurprised. “That happens sometimes,” he said, shrugging. “At least I get paid this time. And she didn’t turn into a monster and try to eat me, that was a nice surprise.” He started walking off. “See you around, if you’re not dead before then.”
“But—!” I spluttered. “April!”
There was a giggle from above us, and a piece of note paper floated down. We looked up. The white-coated Tall Man from the hospital was standing on the roof. April, most likely. She raised a rivet gun and saluted us.
“Whyyyy??” I wailed at April.
April vanished in a swirl of incomprehensible notes, and reappeared a hundred yards away, heading into the forest.
“It’s not worth chasing her, she’s got too much of a head start,” said Aaron. “Even if I flew...”
“Hmph.”
“I’m glad she’s alive at least.” Clarence was optimistic despite April obviously being a traitor. A traitor to what, I wasn’t sure. But she was definitely suspicious. Why else would she run? And also...
“Hold on, did any of you see her arm?”
We thought.
“She took the gem with her right hand,” said Aaron, his brow furrowing in what was apparently a dragon look of concentration. “There was a flesh-spiral.” He stated definitively. “A big one, all twisty like Ace’s was.”
“That’s not good,” said Clarence in an vast understatement.
“No,” I agreed. “And that gem reminded me of the one back in our facility, the one that we used for recharging our flesh-spirals. She’s got an infinite energy source, and she can turn into a Tall Man and teleport. Oh, and for some reason she’s riveting nonsense to the wall. We’re doomed.”
Huh, looks like we don’t need to worry about lacking for doom now that Terrence has left for his next delivery. April just took care of that for us, how helpful!