“Finally?” Anise says. “We’ve only been here a two weeks.”
Meadow shrugs. “They’re all Elites, and we’ll be working our way southwest around the Black Mountain. I’ll be back in Corwen by May, when Lily is due.”
“Babies,” Wren says with a grunt. “You’re really intent on spending the whole winter adventuring. Not that I blame you. I’m doing the same.”
Meadow nods. “I got holed up at home for most of the past year pregnant and it sucked. What a waste. And it was a boy on top of that.” She sighs heavily.
“You have a kid?” Wren says.
“Yeah, his name’s Glen,” Meadow says. “Couldn’t wait to get him out of me and foist him off on my sister so I could go adventuring again.”
“Very motherly of you,” Wren says. “I don’t blame you.”
“I’m certainly not doing that again,” Anise says. “My daughter’s adopted.”
“I don’t want to have to get pregnant again to try to have a girl this time,” Meadow grumbles.
“You didn’t even stick around to nurse him,” Anise says. “You practically fled the Hearth as soon as the swarms left.”
Meadow shudders. “It was really, really weird, okay? Why can’t the Hearthkeepers have all the kids? They’re the ones who want to sit around home all the time.”
“Well, my sister is working on another one, too,” Anise says.
“In any case, we’ll be leaving in the morning,” Meadow says. “Here’s to hoping for many levels and some decent Deeds.”
Before going back out into the snowy fields and wilderness, we decide to do some investigation in town first. After all, there may also be people from the area in Amroth at the moment who may have heard something.
Nobody pays too much attention to adventurers who go missing in the wilderness, after all. Even if they’re just going to “safe” dungeons, no adventure is ever truly safe. Things happen. Like monsters. And people. Basics and Elites are especially vulnerable. People will notice if an Epic group goes missing, but Basics and Elites are a silver a dozen.
The quest is hardly urgent, but so long as we’re here, we may as well do our due diligence and look into it. We’d feel very silly if we missed something obvious because we were in too much of a hurry to rush off to the next dungeon to spend five minutes asking questions.
In the center of town is a marketplace full of small vendors with stalls. Each of them is covered with an awning marked with faintly glowing sigils, instantly melting any snow that tries to accumulate around them. Enough warmth bleeds away from them into the general market area that the ground is slushy rather than snowy, which is not much of an improvement honestly.
While Anise is distracted (paying more attention to looking out for me than anyone else) and Wren is asking questions of a street vendor, an aura approaches Rowan.
Nothing instantly alarming, but I still avoid looking directly at him and pay close attention to what he’s saying and doing. His clothes are neat but not fancy, and his fair skin and black hair mark him as a local even if I hadn’t been able to detect the Tempest in his soul. (Being around Wren and other foreigners, I’ve managed to start being able to pick out that concept more accurately.)
“Hey, kid,” says the opportunistic Merchant. “You look like a budding adventurer.”
“Yeah,” Rowan says. “What of it?”
“I know a place that’s got stuff for sale that’ll give you a leg up.”
“Like what?” Rowan wonders. “You have equipment for sale? I could use a new shield.”
“I’ve got fine consumables. Healing elixirs and a variety of buff potions.”
If this guy were a legitimate vendor, he would be shouting about his fine wares on a street corner, not approaching teenagers in an alley and conniving them in hushed voices. Rowan’s a bit naive, though, and there isn’t nearly as much wariness in his aura as there ought to be.
I keep my fourth eye firmly fixed on him. I’m more than a little wary, and the others are too busy with the vendor stalls to notice. Rowan gradually takes one step at a time toward the winding alleys.
The sketchy merchant pulls an object out of his coat and holds it close to him between three fingers. A tiny vial holding barely a thimbleful of sparkly magenta liquid.
“Take this, for example,” he says in barely more than a whisper.
“What is it?” Rowan asks.
“Distilled phlogiston. It’ll give you a boost to experience and help you unlock new skills.”
“I don’t know…”
The shady man chuckles. “Well, why don’t I just leave you with a little sample so you can see for yourself.”
[Rowan, hold onto that sample but don’t drink it,] I tell him. [I want to analyze it.]
“If you’re interested in taking a closer look at our wares, we got lots of good stuff you won’t find out here. Our place is right over there, down the alley off the main plaza and around the corner to the left. Good day.”
He leaves Rowan with the sample and slinks away, perhaps to find another teenager to try to sell questionable potions to.
Rowan awkwardly looks down at the vial he’s been left with, his aura full of puzzlement and caution. He’s not so gullible as to not find that conversation a tiny bit suspicious, especially with my telepathic warning.
[Let’s not take that into the guildhall, just in case someone can detect it. Here, I’ll put it into my inventory.]
He passes it over wordlessly and I slip it into my bag of holding for later analysis.
“What’s going on?” Anise wonders.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
[Some sketchy guy was trying to sell Rowan sketchy things,] I send to my party. [He even offered up a free sample, which tells me that whatever this stuff is, it’s probably addictive. Wren, do you know a good spot where I can sample this through my psychic senses? I would prefer not to get arrested for having something probably-illegal on me.]
“The guards are useless, but yeah,” Wren murmurs. “Let’s head for my old place. Probably best not to take the whole party, though.”
[Rowan, Basalt, head back to the guild, alright?]
They nod, and the party splits up with me and Anise following Wren through the town. She leads us to what should have been Amroth’s guest house, and while it bears a superficial resemblance to the one in Corwen, it’s much less homey. Some of the windows have been boarded up, and there’s more graffiti covering the peeling walls than the green paint job they were originally given.
The hearth isn’t much better. It has the standard layout with a large fireplace in the middle and a kitchen area off to one side, and people are eating food and playing cards at some of the tables. The food being served here is just thin gruel and crusty bread, and no one here is particularly happy. (I even detect someone cheating at cards, but don’t care enough to say anything.)
Wren leads us to the third floor and into a small apartment, locking the door behind her. The room is cluttered with an assortment of junk, none of which looks especially valuable.
“I haven’t cleared out all my crap yet,” Wren says. “I don’t even know what I’m going to do with some of this stuff, but I’ll be happy to move out of here when we leave town. I’ll probably just sell most of it back to the shop I used to work at. Most of it came from there in the first place. Items I thought I might do something with. Feel free to look through it and see if there’s anything you’d find useful. So what did that guy give Rowan?”
I pull the vial out of my bag and hold it up. “This stuff looks really weird.”
“Floj,” Wren says with a nod. “I don’t suggest drinking it, but I think you already know better.”
“I just wanted to look at it, really. What in the Void even is it? That shady guy called it ‘distilled phlogiston’.”
I give it a more careful analysis than I was able to do in the brief glimpse I got of it on the streets.
This stuff is alive? By some definitely of “alive”, at any rate. The azure in its aura marks it as a “Mind”, which is not a category of aura I’ve seen often.
The substance in the vial looks most closely like experience, weirdly enough. But unlike quests, which I see as frozen sparks on someone’s aura, this has been crystallized somehow and suspended in semi-living goo. It glitters and flows in a very different way than I’ve seen before.
Wren shrugs. “Dunno how it’s made. Never wanted to know. I just know it destroys people. They promise it gives them experience, alright. But it gives a lot of experience in skills that ain’t good to have. Like [Addiction] and [Self-Delusion]. Skills like that hurt you. It costs a lot to pay someone to change your skills. The few people that do it charge whatever they feel like.”
“There are people who can change skills?” I ask, looking up with some level of alarm.
Wren nods. “Oh yeah. I mean, don’t worry too much about someone doing it at random. It’s not quick, and anyway, anyone that can do it can screw you over in plenty of other ways.”
“I have 9 levels of Discipline (Self-Delusion) caused by Sanity damage from past life memories,” I admit.
“You never mentioned that,” Anise says.
“Ow,” Wren says, wincing sympathetically. “Didn’t know that could happen, but then, I never knew any reincarnators before you very well.”
I shrug. “I wasn’t too worried. I’m sure I can figure out a way to change it myself eventually. My delusion is that the world is perfectly normal and everything is fine.”
“You’re very self-aware for someone self-delusional,” Wren says with a smirk.
“Discipline (Self-Awareness) is trying to catch up,” I say. “In any case, this stuff is very interesting to look at and also rather worrisome.”
I pull a small copper bowl from Hebron out of my bag and pour the vial of strange liquid into it. The vial itself is completely nonmagical, just cheap glass.
“Careful with that,” Wren says. “Why are you carrying around a bowl?”
“I have a bag of holding full of useful, lightweight items,” I say.
“I would have expected, y’know, lockpicks and things.”
“I have those too. I just don’t need five kilos of them.” I frown down at the weird magenta ooze. “This stuff is really weird. Doesn’t behave like any liquid I’ve seen before.”
I tilt the bowl and watch it swirl around as though it can’t decide whether it wants to be affected by gravity or not. It’s no wonder this was being kept in a sealed vial. I don’t think I even want to touch it, but I can’t stop looking at it with my fourth eye. The way it glitters is hypnotic.
“How do you safely dispose of this, anyway?” I wonder. “I’m not sure that I want to give a potted plant substance addiction.”
“It’ll get sucked up as soon as it touches anything living,” Wren says. “Never asked a plant how it felt afterward. You could just chuck it off the edge.”
I continue to stare, transfixed, at the sparkly magenta goo wriggling in ths bowl. Just as I’m about to ask Wren if she has a funnel (because I apparently don’t), the slime oozes up the side of the bowl on its own and into my hand. I curse aloud and drop the bowl, but it’s too late. It’s already sinking into my skin.
My veins burn. My soul burns. And yet it’s not pain. It’s absolute, all-consuming euphoria, like every skill I’ve ever trained but so much sharper for not having done anything to earn it.
I find myself laying on the floor, trembling. “Ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t have played with that stuff so much.”
“Drake, are you alright?” Anise asks worriedly, crouching down beside me. “What did it do to you?”
“Sorry, I didn’t think it would do that,” Wren says.
“I’m fine,” I mumble. “I think. That was not a drug. That was a slime. These lunatics are bottling slimes and selling them to unsuspecting people.”
My head is fuzzy and I’m having difficulty thinking. What did that do? I must research this more. How did someone suspend experience in a slime like this? I must know.
I lean into [Fractal Consciousness] to steady myself. I have to understand, but I have to understand to fix this.
Wren’s tiny balcony offers a view of only a sliver of the sky, but I’ll take the additional Inspiration. (Plus I find seeing the sky calming for some reason.) I can’t even see Zenith from this angle, just the violet Great Orb and a smattering of skymotes. I borrow a pillow and sit down on it and put my healer’s staff across my legs.
If I got more of this, maybe I could even reach Elite…
No! Stupid. This will not help reach Elite.
While I can’t affect what’s outside my own body until I reach Elite, I can certainly affect my own soul. I’ve been doing it for years now. There’s nothing I know better than my own aura. I soon locate the new skill, like a taught indigo stitch against the flowing colors of my soul.
Inspiration surges through me as I watch the sky with my physical eyes and peer deeply into myself with my fourth. This is what I’ve been learning how to do, isn’t it? Healing and repairing damage to the soul. If I can’t fix this, what hope do I have of freeing the ghosts trapped within me?
I stay calm and focus intently as I gently unravel it. It takes a while, and the skymotes I can see from here slowly change colors as I work at it. When the knot of experience finally comes undone, it flows in a rush to where it’s supposed to be.
I breathe deeply, making sure the damage has fully healed before standing up and returning to the room where Wren and Anise have been worriedly watching me.
“Fortunately, I have been literally learning how to fix this sort of thing,” I say. “I would probably be able to do it for others once I reach Elite.”
“Oh, thank Heavens,” Anise says. “I’d hate for my son to become a drug addict at 9 years old.”
“It’s not even really a drug,” I say. “It’s crystallized experience suspended in a slime. I would both dearly like to know how it’s made and to beat the crap out of whoever thought this was a good idea.”
“I don’t think it’s even made in this domain,” Wren says. “But hey, maybe we’ll get the chance eventually.”
“I’m keeping [Self-Delusion] for the moment, though, but I don’t need to be more obsessed than I already am.”
I’ve only now realized just how dangerous skills can be. Here I had been thinking that every skill was a net positive regardless of what it was. But they all affect me. They all become a part of my aura, a part of my soul, a part of who I am. I need to be more careful, and I need to think more deeply before I go unlocking skills willy-nilly. This was an accident, but a stark reminder of how careless I’ve been in general.
I need to focus more. And decide just who I want to be. I’m still five years out from a class change, which should be plenty of time for preparation if I can figure out what direction I intend to take myself.