James frowned. “Any chance we could get a few basics out of the way first?” he asked, much to my chagrin. “I saw what looked like some coconuts around, but I don’t know what else on this island might be edible. I haven’t seen any water, and I’m feeling pretty dehydrated.”

  I thought for a minute. As much as I wanted to get some answers from him, he did look pretty miserable. “You’ll know what’s edible better than me,” I said. “As for water… yeah, there’s no fresh water here.”

  James raised an eyebrow and went to say something, but then he hesitated. “Am I to understand that you don’t need water to survive?” he asked. “Cuz if you're messing with me, that’s really not the sort of joke I can handle right now.”

  I stared at him like he was stupid, doing my best to make sure the mannerism would be recognizable to a human. James didn’t seem to get it.

  “Do you… not know what a monster is?” I asked.

  “Five minutes ago, I would have said of course I do,” he said, “but I’m reading from your tone that the definition of a monster somehow has something to do with you not joking about how screwed I am.”

  I was beginning to rethink my assessment of James. As funny as it had been to think he was dumb, I didn’t actually think being that dumb was actually possible. I didn’t know that much about human culture, but I was pretty sure monsters were everywhere, and I was pretty sure reaching adulthood without knowing what they were was unlikely, even for a cripple. When there were magical creatures running around that survived by feeding off of other magical creatures, that came up in conversation from time to time.

  I thought about his pants. Well, I thought harder about his pants.

  “Where exactly did you say you were from again?” I asked.

  “Uh… Colorado,” he said. “You know what, I think coconuts have some water in them. It also feels humid here. I can make some kind of rain catcher and…”

  Yeah, I kind of stopped listening to what he was saying after Colorado. Colorado was… big. It came with countless flashes of memory, each one stranger than the last.

  Smiling faces overlooking stunning vistas? Pretty standard for home countries. A strangely pervasive smell of skunk spray and body odor? Hardly out of the question. Even the vehicles, though a bit weird looking and unusually numerous, weren’t totally beyond the realm of possibility.

  The city though? It was straight up alien. The buildings were too tall. The people were too numerous. There were airplanes flying around in the distant sky. I’d never seen or felt anything like it.

  “I don’t suppose you’d mind getting me a coconut?” James asked as my mind wandered. “I hate to ask for help, but I think I must have gotten a shot of adrenaline when I woke up, and it’s wearing off fast…”

  It took James trailing off, sagging to the ground, and throwing up in his own lap to bring my attention back to him. I stared in horror at the disgusting mess that rapidly stained my precious project as he proceeded to convulse with drooling dry heaves a couple of times.

  “Damn it, James!” I said, genuinely upset. “If you were gonna die of thirst, couldn’t you have done it without ruining the only nice thing I was gonna have for the rest of my life?”

  James muttered something incomprehensible, clutching his stomach and shaking. I clicked my mandibles in exasperation. I really didn’t want him to die so soon. What had he said he needed? A coconut? I’d kinda forgotten that those had water in them. I’m not much of a coconut guy.

  I left James sagging on the ground to go climb a tree. It didn’t take long to find one with a few immature coconuts poking above the canopy. I tried to remember just how many coconut trees were on my island as I climbed. How long would they last? If I made some kind of rain catching basin, how big would it have to be to make it through the dryer season?

  I paused as I poked my head above the canopy, checking for ships. Nobody on a passing ship was likely to see me from a distance, and no crew would be likely to go out of their way to hunt down a single Xikirix on a deserted island anyway, but I always checked out of habit.

  I plucked a cluster of six coconuts from the inflorescence and tossed them to the ground. None of them broke when they hit. I wondered if James had a plan for actually getting to the water inside. I’m strong enough to break a person’s skin with no problem, but I was pretty sure I’d break a leg trying to stab a hole in one of those things without using mana.

  “Are you gonna, like, hit these with a big stick or something?” I asked James as I dragged the cluster into the clearing.

  “Dunno,” James mumbled dizzily. “I don’t suppose you have a screwdriver or something lying around somewhere.”

  “Screwdriver…” I muttered to myself as the meaning entered my mind. “That makes more sense than the rest of the weird stuff you’ve said, but it seems like those are generally for sticking things together when you want to be able to take them apart later. Wouldn’t a hammer and nail better fit the situation?”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “That would work too,” James said. “You got a hammer and nail then?”

  “No, I was just… you know what, never mind,” I said.

  With a groan, James crawled over to one of the coconuts and picked it up. “This is a coconut?” he said. “I thought they were supposed to be brown.”

  “It’s young,” I said. “The brown ones have less water.”

  “Huh,” James said. Then he shrugged, and tried to bite into the coconut. I kinda just watched in consternation as he gnawed at it for the next five minutes, trying in vain to peel enough of the shell away to get to the water inside.

  I looked over at the coconuts that weren’t drenched in vomit tainted saliva. My mana reserves weren’t high at the moment. It drained over time just maintaining my body, and I hadn’t had much time to recharge. That said, exerting forces on things didn’t take much. Heck, it could be tricky not to accidentally blow things to smithereens, but I’d had precious little to do other than practice over the past few years.

  I summoned a bit of force. Normally, I’d just focus on a weak point and blast my way in. That was fast, effective, and took so little mana it was hard to even notice the difference. James had just unwittingly taught me about screwdrivers though, and I guess I was curious.

  Making a ‘mana screw’ would be inefficient. It would require the constant exertion of force in almost every direction at once. It would be difficult to maintain, and tricky to adjust on the fly to move through different materials. For lack of a better way of putting it, coating the entire screw with enough force to drill through the coconut would create a miniature vortex in the air. It’d be best to essentially create the screw as it drilled into the coconut, and I’d probably never need more than the tip, but I wanted to try manifesting a full screw’s worth of force in the air to start with, just to get the shape right.

  In most cases, the hammer and nail application of force would be better, but it might be nice to have a method that offered more control at my disposal.

  I started trying to shape my force screw. I’d start with a slowly rotating cone in the air. Funnily enough, it takes more time to manifest mana as force than matter. We assume it’s due to a biological factor as opposed to the fundamental nature of magic.

  After a few seconds, I was standing behind a slight disturbance in the air. I tried pulling the cone in around the edges and adding some protrusions, but I got a little confused and the whole structure dissipated.

  “What was that?” James asked, reminding me that he was actively dying of thirst, and that I might want to wait until later to practice niche methods of mana control. The hammer and nail would do for now.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You gave me an idea, but it’s not really helpful right this second.”

  With that, I accidentally blew up a coconut. I had overestimated how tough it would be, and it was always a bit tricky to summon bursts of force like this. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad. The thing shattered, but the shrapnel only flew a few inches, so none of it hurt me or James. That said, all of the water splashed uselessly to the ground.

  “Hmm…” I said, feeling a little embarrassed.

  There was utter silence for a moment, save for the rustle of leaves in the breeze.

  James made a bit of a choking sound. “Am I delirious,” he asked, “or did one of those coconuts just spontaneously combust?”

  “Definitely delirious,” I said, leaving him to watch, baffled, as I moved onto the next coconut. I was significantly more careful this time, and ended up chipping my way in via three much weaker bursts. It took a touch more mana to hold the coconut in place than it did to chip through it. Simply exerting the same type of force on the other side of it would have left me with two holes, so I had to work with less force more widely distributed. I believe I’ve already demonstrated why one might not want to physically hold something you’re hitting with mana bursts. When I was done, I picked up the coconut and held it out to James.

  He just stared at it for a minute.

  “It’s not going to explode when I touch it, is it?” he asked.

  “Why would it explode?” I asked in turn. “Coconuts don’t explode.”

  He looked dubiously at the debris of my victim and hesitantly reached out a hand to take the proffered water. I must admit, I was a little tempted to blow it up in his face, just because of how careful he was being.

  He tilted it up and took a cautious sip, scrunching his face slightly at the unfamiliar flavor. Then, he lifted it up and took another small sip.

  “I thought you said you were thirsty,” I said, confused by his lack of enthusiasm. “Does it taste weird or something?”

  James took another sip. “I don’t know how dehydrated I am,” he said. “I feel pretty terrible though, so I’m assuming it’s bad. It can be dangerous to drink too much water too fast when you’re severely dehydrated.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” I said. “If you don’t get water, you’ll die, but if you do get water, you’ll also die? No wonder so many mana stripped people die of thirst.”

  “I don’t know the details,” he said. “I probably just heard it in a movie or something, but I can guess at how it works. Getting dehydrated is a slow process, and your body adapts to keep you alive. Adaptation doesn’t happen on a dime though, so you have to make sure you readapt slowly to prevent your body from getting overwhelmed. Or I do at least. Do normal people here not need water?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Mana can keep most anything alive on its own. Drinking might reduce the expenditure for some species though.”

  That line of thinking brought a few other loose threads to mind. The ever looming question of James’s pants, and Colorado.

  That said, I couldn’t help but hesitate to ask when I looked back at the guy’s face. He looked like his skin might start falling off at any moment. I felt an unexpected tinge of pity for him, and it occured to me that I’d just spent the last fifteen minutes doing what I could to help him. I’d hardly even thought about it. He needed water, so I brought him water. Just like that.

  I wasn’t really sure whether to be troubled or not. Was I going to spend the next few days being this strange man’s personal servant? I didn’t much like the sound of that.

  “You should probably rest for a bit,” I said, crawling back towards my stump. “I get the feeling we have a lot to talk about, but it should probably wait until there’s less risk of you sinking into delirium. With some of the stuff you’ve said, I’m half convinced you’re already there.”

  James snorted. “If you’re not really a magic spider who blows up coconuts, I think that’s our sign.”